Hello,
This newsletter has been enjoying its semi-planned summer hiatus, exactly as I hope you are too—wherever you are, allowing for the fact this summer hasn’t been too enjoyable for many of us—but I figured I’d blow off the mothballs to remind that Slow Players still exists (indeed, with plans for many more robust installments in the near-term future), and also to account for the absence. Naturally, I’m writing a book, and while it’s one that was giving me fits for a long while—I started it even before I’d finished Always Crashing in the Same Car—it’s finally racked into focus.
Wild, huh? That there is a first draft in the midst of becoming a second one—I always write the second draft, pretty much from scratch, by hand over the bones of the first—which I will then type up into a third, to be delivered later this year. This book, which is called The Golden Hour, I’ll have more to say about later. Like Always Crashing, it’s a memoir, but with a much more narrative approach: a history of my family, spanning about seventy years, that is also a history of the modern motion picture business, and of modern America itself. It’s wild as hell, and I get the feeling I’m gonna be extremely excited to share it when it’s done. But that’s where I’ve been, and am: if I owe you an email, or anything else, hopefully you’ll understand.
Then again, being late is what this newsletter is all about. I’m stubborn about this: I like to read (or watch, or listen to) things a little behind the curve, when everyone else has stopped talking about them. What I lose in sometimes feeling like an idiot (“You mean Succession really is good, just like every last person on earth has been telling me for a year? Who knew?”) I gain in privacy, in that restoration (more or less) of the one-to-one contract between art object and art-viewer (-listener, -reader) that is the only kind that ever makes sense to me anyway.
I was going to write, this time around, about a great Los Angeles movie, a neglected 70s noir that might appeal to you if you’re a fan of Night Moves or The Long Goodbye, but given the recent fate of Roe—and given that the movie heavily features a person most folks would agree hasn’t been cancelled enough for multiple sex crimes—I can’t do it. This would be the place to donate to support abortion access in whatever state (and this would be another, if you haven’t already), and writing about that film will need to keep for now. I will write about it, though, as it’s excellent beyond the worm-in-its-apple (who happens to turn in a good performance in the movie too): written by an emerging Walter Hill, and then rewritten by my own late father-in-law, who also directs, beautifully, and stars. You can read my buddy Charley Taylor’s fantastic appreciation of it here, if you like, and it remains, a little surprisingly, easy to find on streaming services. It’s killer. But another time for that one.
Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is an apt substitute for that one: a little later on the timeline (‘81, to Hickey and Boggs’s ‘72), but just as bleak, just as saturated in post-Watergate, post-Vietnam malaise. If you’re looking to bum yourself out this weekend (or maybe just to remember that the American experiment has long been a mess: one can derive hope from these things too), I’d recommend it. Young Jeff Bridges starring opposite John Heard in a story about a Vietnam vet (Heard) and a feckless gigolo (Bridges) who get drawn into the aftermath of a young woman’s murder. The nature of that aftermath, the perhaps-imagined conspiracy gleaned by Heard’s disabled veteran (a Shakespearean figure: Passer cast him in the role after seeing the actor do Othello in Central Park) is the movie: a puzzle that not only lacks an answer, it may not even be a “puzzle” at all. Which, of course, is the point: Sancho Panza tilts at his windmills, John Heard’s Alex Cutter tilts at . . . the rotted cultural overbelly of corporate America. Like any good noir, it’s long on vibe, which you can glean from its opening sequence above: the clip begins with a dreamy-looking shot of the (nonexistent) “Founders Day Parade” in Santa Barbara that looks almost like the beginning of Blue Velvet, only here the tone is sun-bleached, sea-worn, coastal. The whole film has a sodden, abyssal feeling: the feeling of being no-longer-drunk on margaritas at three in the afternoon, when you suddenly have to make the decision whether to re-up or take six Advil and hope for a few hours of sleep. That may not sound like a good time to you—and it isn’t, really, a “good time”—but the film has a ton to offer: John Heard’s ferocious performance and Bridges’ gentle, complex one; Jack Nitzsche’s magnificently downbeat score (part-mariachi, part theremin-waltz, it’s like a superior cousin to the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest score for which he won an Oscar), some beautiful, beautiful scenes between Bridges and Lisa Eichhorn that are worth the price of admission alone. The film is adapted from Newton Thornberg’s novel Cutter and Bone, which is also worth its price if you can find it—it’s easy to find cheap, used—even if you have seen the movie because it’s almost entirely different. The novel gives greater weight to Cutter’s foil, Richard Bone (Bridges’ part in the movie), and effectively works out a different plot altogether in its second half. But it’s excellent too, and if the idea of a writer naming their gigolo character “Richard Bone” seems a little on the, uh, nose (or something) fear not: it’s as solid a piece of American alcoholic bummer literature as John O’Brien’s Leaving Los Vegas (I prefer it to that book, actually), and might, too, have made for the better movie.
Bummer atop bummer. Well, that’s fitting, under the circumstances: I don’t know anyone who’s too stoked about the wider situation right now. Happy holiday all the same: despite many of the depressing things about America (the ones articulated in Cutter’s Way too), it remains, as they say, a nice republic if we can keep it.
To cheer us all up, here’s a wild playlist of woozy-sounding tunes that have been keeping me company all summer, and which sound *really* great if you dial the volume up nice and loud: some Anglo- and Swedish psych bangers, Caribbean wig outs, the Isleys, Latino R&B bands covering Black Sabbath, Waylon Jennings doing Fleetwood Mac (in what the magnificent English guitarist Bobby Lee calls “Blue Collar Cocaine Funk”). Ideal on either side of your holiday buzz, or in the absence of one: it slaps, as they say (but with nice, pillowy gloves)
I wrote recently for The Atlantic about Mark Rozzo’s delightful book about Dennis Hopper and Brook Hayward (“delightful” at least until Dennis goes off the deep end, as I reckon he was wont to do). That’d be a nice thing to read this weekend (both the review and the book); if you’d like a look at my office without me in it, and some words about my writing habits, there’s this nice interview here. And I reckon there’ll be something coming up in the New York Times—another book I reviewed recently—in the next few weeks, but since it hasn’t run, best keep mum until it does. I’ll be back soon—sooner rather than later—with more, and with better, but for now, Happy 4th, y’all, and . . . do always remember what’s good*.
Yrs,
Matthew
*
Some great tracks on the hangover playlist, a lot of things I’d never heard before. I checked out Jonathan Wilson’s new one, Eat the Worm, one of the better albums I’ve heard this year.
Great waking up to your brilliant take on this. Thought I was the only one in the Newt Thornberg army.. Love all of this books but especially THE KNOCKOVER, his take on a caper novel and TO DIE IN CALIFORNIA. Thanks for sharing -