Musings, opinions and linkage from writer Chip Jacobs, author of The Ascension of Jerry, Smogtown (with William J. Kelly) and Wheeling the Deal. Visit chipjacobs.com to learn more.
The stranger I’d incensed in the rusty, white Volkswagen bus pumped his fist out the window, cussing. “Motherfucker,” he yelled. “I’m gonna get YOU!” His promise came with little javelins of spit that pelted out of his mouth, liquid vulgarity over which he had little control. That look — his detesting eyes, the scarlet veins branching through his neck — were nothing I’d ever seen before, at least not in the rear-view mirror of my father’s boat-sized Pontiac Grand Safari. My vehicular offense, apparently, was unforgiveable to the person now committed to my comeuppance. I’d forced the man to swerve when I’d inadvertently cut him off changing lanes on a road in the hilly Los Angeles suburb of Altadena. I was a seventeen-year-old high school junior, and the fortyish, VW owner had found a target. “You motherfucker,” he kept saying.
Seated next to me that spring day in 1979 was one my best friends, Dave Ferris. Neither of us had any inkling how to elude the tailgater, let alone what he might do to us. “Road rage” hadn’t yet been coined. Our jabbering about the history instructor whose dentures had dropped to the floor mid-lecture stopped when we measured our vulnerability out here. I sped up to the next signal to get some separation. There was none. The Volkswagen stayed on my chrome bumper with the Led Zeppelin sticker on it, the hate coming out of that van like the singed, black exhaust it disgorged. Dave and I stared blankly ahead. The radio was flicked off. Our brains migrated into SOS wavelengths, yet there was no cop or Good Samaritan in sight on the rain-glistened streets. I pulled over into the right lane, going east, praying the stranger would settle for flipping us the bird off and tearing away. Surely, that’d satisfy his spleen over a lane-changing miscue. No, it would not. He jerked from behind me into the left lane. At the stoplight, he rolled his passenger-side widow down to glower again, as if he had decided we were worthy of his dark attentions. I knew I had to do something drastic or risk being on the six o’clock news. So, once the light flashed to green, I glided half a block, veering off with a sharp, right turn at the first street we passed. Consider yourself ditched, psycho! When I looked back, my stomach air dropped. Not only was our pursuer right behind us, his VW was blocking our escape on the block that was actually a cul-de-sac. We were dead meat over a mulligan.
The world then was an ornery, random place, just as it seems in 2012 as we wage wars without end and read cavalierly about the unemployed father who slaughters his family in a PTSD-stricken spasm. There was no Google, no Facebook, no Prius and no noticeably melting glaciers in 1979. There were Japanese stereos, computers as big as steamer-trunks, tricked-out Camaros and eye-watering smog. At our school, La Canada’s private Flintridge Preparatory, Dave and I had heard about how history loops in cycles, so prosperity ebbs into recession and fascism follows nationalism. Nobody, though, had explained why individual Americans were lashing out, as they deposited rattlesnakes in mailboxes and hung state leaders in effigy, why they moved into gated communities or took out gun permits by the barrell. To me, it was generational occurrence: every twenty years or so, a collection of folks were bound to scream the classic snarl from the movie, “Network” — “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!” Everything was going wrong in the land of opportunity. Disenchantment and self-doubt following Vietnam and Watergate had become embitterment and cynicism about the future, as the Arabs embargoed our oil and President Jimmy Carter cajoled us to turn down our thermostats in his Mr. Rogers sweater. Nowhere was the population brooding more than in “laid-back” Southern California, where the coastline still shimmered and tourists bought maps to the stars’ homes even as serial monsters – the “Freeway Killer,” “The Hillside Strangle,” Orange County’s Rodney Alcala –roamed the freeways and factories yanked up their stakes in the first vapors of globalization.
Think about the planet today and it’s easy to see the wreckage of the late-seventies in the refraction. A Democratic president promising to restore hope must battle the status quo while struggling to save our pensions and protect our borders. Today’s “Great Recession” was yesteryear’s “stagflation.” Wall Street bailouts and the collapse of GM recall the Chrysler Corp. bankruptcy requiring a $1-billion loan that infuriated many blue collars. People mistrustful of their government today need only revisit the national mood after the Three Mile Island disaster. Outside the country, the scowling faces of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and the students he allowed to seize the U.S embassy suggested we Westerners had no monopoly on anger. Forget, too, about John Wayne storming the desert to rescue the hostages. He’d expired from cancer. When Soviet tanks rolled down the Khyber Pass and into Afghanistan, where superpowers go to die, any illusion of a well-adjusted, post-sixties planet circled the drain. Blood-thirsty, resentful folks made sure of that. Jerry Schneiderman, an untested space-planner with a startup firm and young family, never could’ve imagined that his city of scattered high-rises and dreamy potential would plop a resentful multi-killer with a contractor’s license into his lap. One bullet transformed the real into surreal in Los Angeles. One bullet and Jerry’s real-life education comprised an assassinated partner, an endangered child, an epileptic triggerman, a cross-dressing thief, and more post-traumatic lesions than Dr. Phil could address in a special. Read my true-crime book about him to verify any doubts. Jerry-endangered metastasized into Jerry-the-cunning.
The fuming soul who climbed out of his two-tone VW that day in ’79 was bearded and storkish, easily 6’3,” wearing an Army-surplus jacket that Robert DeNiro might’ve chucked in a Taxi Driver outtake. Outside his mini-bus, he was just as enraged as he’d been inside of it. Dave and I were statues in our seats as he swung up to the driver’s side window in what seemed a half-stride. Any second, I expected his hand would flash a pistol or machete and our blood would be all over the Pontiac’s caramel-colored, leather upholstery. My mind went weird – to the clinical. Instead of thinking about my defense when the weapon was drawn, I remember asking myself what misery – divorce, cancer, unemployment, loosened sanity, voices in the head – he hoped to exorcise by terrorizing us. Just because I’d forced him to swerve on a foggy afternoon. Maybe some part of me needed to know his suffering before he slaughtered us over it. Then his oversized noggin was fully leaning into the car, invading it, filling it with that bloodshot spirit. I tried not soiling myself as I leaned away. “Don’t ever, EVER, do that to ME again! You hear me, kid?” His breath reeked, not just of nicotine, but of something diseased inside. “Not to me.” “Yes sir,” I stammered.” He stared deep into my eyes, as if he were calculating whether we merited extermination with a “motherfucker” Banshee whoop. His right fist vibrated near me, slightly swaying for a interminable few seconds. What was in his other hand, the one outside the car, I wondered? I’d never know. Abruptly, he withdrew his fist and his head, stomping back to his VW bus, to his bottomed-out existence in a country malnourished for hope, and floored it. NEVER AGAIN!” he shouted. Something tells me we weren’t the last ones he’d stalk over the trivial.
* Talk about the tail wagging the dog, or this instance aggressive, ADA-suing lawyers finding casues for action before they even found their clients. From the New York Times:
“A small cadre of lawyers, some from out of state, are using New York City’s age and architectural quirkiness as the foundation for a flood of lawsuits citing violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The lawyers are generally not acting on existing complaints from people with disabilities. Instead, they identify local businesses, like bagel shops and delis, that are not in compliance with the law, and then aggressively recruit plaintiffs from advocacy groups for people with disabilities. The plaintiffs typically collect $500 for each suit, and each plaintiff can be used several times over. The lawyers, meanwhile, make several thousands of dollars, because the civil rights law entitles them to legal fees from the noncompliant businesses. The practice has set off a debate about whether the lawsuits are a laudable effort, because they force businesses to make physical improvements to comply with the disabilities act, or simply a form of ambulance-chasing, with no one actually having been injured …”
* If I was king of the world for a day, empathy exercises of this sort would be required. L.A. Daily News tells us just how much we can learn by sitting down (and not feeling anything):
“James Shidner gave a mighty push but the wheelchair just wouldn’t budge. He kept trying to roll back up onto the concrete pathway at his school, but he just couldn’t manage the feat. Finally his principal came to the rescue, exerting some serious effort to push him off the patch of dirt and back on the path. Though the sixth-grader was perfectly capable of walking, he and other students at The Country School in Valley Village were taking turns spending a day in wheelchairs to learn some valuable lessons. “The wheelchair was like a toy in the first five minutes but, after a while, you start to realize it’s hard to do things without your legs,” Shidner, 12, said …”
* Don’t ever underestimate the sharp elbows and competitive fire of a Wounded Warrior. That is, unless you’re ready to get posted up and knocked down. Wheelchair basketball ain’t for whimps. I’m not sure it’s even made for Andrew Bynum, having seen the physicality and intensity of it up close.
“For Angelo Anderson, a 3rd Class Navy corpsman, it was July 2, 2010. He was on foot patrol in Afghanistan, safeguarding the medical needs of Marines, when he heard the menacing bark of an AK-47. He’d been shot twice, in his thigh and his funny bone, while his gear and rifle were blown to bits. He once was a lightning-fast runner, able to run three 6-minute miles back-to-back, or race 400 meters in 50 seconds. Now those days were over. But let the new games begin again. “It’s thrilling,” said Anderson, 22, of Portsmouth, Va., of the Warrior Games, where he’ll play wheelchair basketball and other events. “I gave up running cross country and playing basketball. This gives me the satisfaction of competition. It’s awesome” …”
The old men ordered me to come in from the rain. Smiling, they asked what I was doing out there in the cold? Dry yourself off. I’d just rung the doorbell about fifteen seconds earlier. Obviously, I’d been expected.
Before I had barely taken a step into Norm Pringle’s shingled, ranch-style West Valley home, my soggy, outdoor jacket that’d survived two years of East Coast grad school was being swept off of me by insistent hands. Norm and his former colleague, the gregarious, back-slapping Joe von Stroheim, just about dragged me into Norm’s living room, where tables had been set up, scrapbooks strategically placed. “What cha drinking?” Norm asked. “Whatever you are,” I responded. Some very hard liquor in a sweet little glass was given to me. Appetizers would soon slide in, followed by a tasty dinner, desert, coffee and a few more drinks. It was a magical night for me to begin my book-writing career. My head disagreed the next morning, but my heart was skipping. These men, these keepers of memory, had really taken me in.
Just to be clear, they actually were not geezers that stormy night in early 1997, not if geezer denotes decrepit. Their white hair belied a brisk pace, a little arthritis no match for the life zip still piping through them. But what did I know? I was in my mid-thirties. They fought in World War II. Some years later, Norm and Joe had begun work for my uncle, the incorrigible Gordon Zahler, as editors at his sorta-famous, independent Hollywood production company, General Music Corp. Both of them sorta-remembered me as a hyper, touch-everything-I-shouldn’t little kid when my mom, Gordon’s older sister, brought me round the company for visits in the early-1970s. When I’d phoned them all those years later to say I was leaving daily journalism to pen a book about Gordon, they practically shape-shifted through the phone in their unconditional willingness to help. If I could boil down their philosophy, it was this: “anything you need, kid. Anything!”
Over and over through the years I’d think about their energy to dig up recollections buried in their synapses, if not old files and tapes sticky with attic dust, about a boss dead since ’75. Just as my uncle became friends with earnest, industrious Norm and live-wire, jocular Joe, I also did, too. I craved every anecdote, every bizarre work episode, every illuminating experience they had with Gordon, because I’d had so few pleasant ones with him while he was alive. In looking back, I guess they enjoyed somebody in me who saw what they’d done in Hollywood, far behind the cameras and celebrity vapors, as professional labors of love, as careers well spent. How they put up with my idea-spit-balling, perfection-seeking, general piker of a relative, a 95-pound man whose raconteur mouth accounted for much of his body mass, to me is the stuff that Congressional Medals of Honor are dished out for.
Sadly, Joe – the son of blackballed, brilliant, silent-picture movie director Erich von Stroheim – died before my book, Wheeling the Deal, was published. I miss the hell out of him. He was a tremendous sound and effects editor, an award-winner, and an even more entertaining human. (The first time I came to his home in the Valley for an interview, he brought out a red-and-black Nazi flag that he’d grabbed as a souvenir during his dogface grunt days in World War II, when there was a bounty on Joe’s head for his father’s dead-on portrayal of souless, homicidal SS officers). No, he assured me, he was no closet Aryan Supremacist. He treasured his mementos.) Like him, many other editors, partners and others connected to Gordon’s impossible life parted the earth when I wanted them to stick around to see Gordon’s life storyified. So many talents never appreciated. Yet, so many better off for never buying into the industry B.S. — like Joe!
But Norm had hung on even after losing his wife, Elsie, one of the kindest ladies I’ve ever met. He gave new meaning to the term “idea-man.” In fact, he might’ve singlehandedly retired the old definition with the sheer volume of schemes that his fertile mind churned out in assembly-line manner. Veteran memorials, sing-a-long clubs, special studio events, fictionalized dramas: and those were just what he hatched by Wednesday. You’d have an easier time slurrying a natural geyser closed than his imagination. He was always this way; Norm had a terrific, original screenplay (about a Canadian mountain avalanche disaster) from the 1960s he wanted to revive in the 2000s. He used to produce hilarious, current-event records in the long shot one would hit. “LSD: the Final Voyage” was a sample, Norm cross-pollinating Star Trek with psychedlic-age vitamins.
While many older folks are afraid that if they touch a computer keyboard it will unleash black hole singularity, Norm, I’d wager, was afraid what would happen if he didn’t touch his keyboard on a regular basis. Pretty much by his lonesome, he created, developed and operated an Internet radio station called “Cybercloud” that a tech-savvy teenager would tweet about in pride. Sometimes, when we’d meet for lunch in Van Nuys, ironically enough at a restaurant that plays a role in my latest book, The Ascension of Jerry, Norm would regale me with his latest plans, only to exhibit a little, blue-collar fatalism that somebody would actually bite. His trademark suspenders pulled tight when he rocked back in his chair and said with a wee “Great North” accent from his youth, “It’ll probably never happen. What’s new with you?” You see, that was one of the paradoxes of Norm’s life. He’d migrated to Hollywood after a successful career dee-jaying in Canada, where he’d helped discover Leslie Nielsen and interviewed a nifty set of celebrities, including Elvis. After nearly being forced to return when L.A. jobs proved scarce, Norm took one editor post after another to support his family when indeed his true calling was probably as an inventor or creative manager with an eye for public trends. After Gordon died, Norm went to work for Warner Bros studios, doing, among things, sound transfers for the “Kung Fu” series. Never did he stop dreaming.
Probably not even up to his last day. Norm died on March 17, after a series of debilitating strokes, at the Motion Picture Home north of Los Angeles. He was eighty-eight (an admirable number for a former Candian Royal Air Force vet who survived one of several accidents that inspired his nickname “Crash.”) At the service that followed, back at his old house where Norm and Joe adopted me as the kid-writer that they’d educate in all-things Gordon, relatives and friends remembered a person who adapted to difficulties, who filled his kid’s childhoods with imaginative play-yards and invented games, who never allowed bitterness to mothball a smile. As the tears rolled, and the wistful smiles appeared, I harkened back to that rainy night when Norm put his meaty arm around me as if to declare I had a pal in him — forever. Back at you, Norm. We’ll catch you on the other side. By then, your inventions will fill a Hollywood back-lot.
Bumbling hitmen. Burning corpses. A threatened son. Life in hiding. Jerry Schneiderman’s orderly world evaporated when his business partner was executed by an assassin in 1979 Los Angeles, and the buzzard-eyed ringleader came for him. Though the killers behind the murder-for-hire corporation were nabbed, the trauma annihilated Jerry’s family and strip-mined his trust. Recovery only came years later with Jerry’s improbable rebirth as a prank-loving activist who defended the weak by milking his scars.
* “In Chip Jacobs true-crime, The Ascension of Jerry, we are whisked back to LA’s Kodachrome world of the Seventies. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Jerry, the “bright colors and greens of summer” quickly change to the real life black-and-whites of mayhem and murder. But, this is not just another Hollywood Whodunit. In the end we find it is really about one man’s search and struggle to find his own personal truths and redemption. Well written and highly recommended.” –Steve Hodel, LAPD Hollywood Homicide detective (ret.) and bestselling author of ”Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder.”
* “Jacobs delivers a seductive tour of an L.A. rife with murder-for-hire plots, political corruption and sociopathic schemes. Against this backdrop the young Schneiderman comes of age, to ultimately emerge as the last man standing. A terrific book – I couldn’t put it down! — Stephen Jay Schwartz, L.A. Times bestselling author of Boulevard and Beat.
* “Chip Jacobs’ chops as an accomplished newspaperman are on brilliant display in The Ascension of Jerry, a delightfully off-kilter true-crime tale of a hero (sorta) who is neither especially loathsome nor lovable … maybe just lucky to get out alive. Jacobs’ prose is intimate, darkly funny, and crisp as he follows the twisted path that leads SoCal businessman Jerry Schneiderman through a series of weird events – including crossing paths with some dumb-ass hitmen and some burning corpses – only to emerge as a merry prankster with a jones for social activism. (If you haven’t yet deduced that this book is not your Mama’s supermarket true-crime trash, then you’re doing it wrong. But here’s the thing: Jacobs’ ear for a good story is pitch perfect, and he tells it with all the smoggy pastel colors of post-noir LA. The Ascension of Jerry isn’t an old song in a new key, but an entirely new song about crime, fear, and a weird kind of redemption that could only happen in the general vicinity of Hollywood. Jacobs is a genuine writer, not a wannabe scribbler. He knows what makes us keep turning pages. So for those few true-crime readers who like their mayhem served up in a sumptuous story, seek this one out.” — Ron Franscell, celebrated true-crime author.
* a “wildly unpredictable mix of darkly humorous and highly dangerous events“— “Killer Prose: With The Ascension of Jerry, Writer Chip Jacobs Reveals his Wildest Tale Yet “- Pasadena Weekly, March 23, 2012 (Note: the “murder corporation” referenced in this article was located near but not in the old Bullocks department store in Pasadena).
(Note: some bookstores are still listing incorrect information about the book that we expect to be remedied soon. Some minor production issues in the book will also be corrected in short order.)
* Recently, Joan Rivers’ former talent manager, Billy Sammeth, decided to air some dirty laundry about his experiences over the years with the comedian-turned-TV show-woman/franchise and Cher. Who knows what really went on there, but the spillage kerfuffle does provide me with the chance to sling a fun-fact. My uncle, Gordon Zahler, the subject of my first book, solicited Joan (no, not that way — the dude was C3/C4 quadriplegic with little sensation down there) to produce a series of drive-time comedy routines. Nobody, as far as I know, had ever rolled out such an idea. The concepet was to entertain commuters on their way to and from work with rising comedians while engaging advertisers to sponsor the shows. Lots of consumer eardrums would be hearing the gaglines, let alone the soap commercials following them. Well, as did so many of my dreamer uncle’s grand plans, this one blew up in his face like an exploding pie. He and Rivers quarrelled, sometimes so vitriolically that they had to be separated. The financing was just as dicey, Gordon evidently not lining up all the advertising money needed to put Rivers on the air mulitple times in a pilot run. Nonetheless, I would give my right something to have seen Rivers and my opinionated, high-energy uncle yelling at each other over comedic timing and whatever else that was irritating them about each other. FWIW, I tried contacting Rivers’ people during my research for Wheeling the Deal with no response. But Gordon WAS part of her history.
* Speaking of connections, Davey Jones, the mop-topped, shiny-eyed Brit who led the 1960s rock group, The Monkees, died last week at the unfortunate, early age of 66. Just about the time the Monkees were crushing it on TV as Americanized/homogenized/serialized Beatle-types, my uncle was in the midst of a persuasion campaign to get one of their creators, Don Kirshner, to promote a global animal show using the famous critters from primetime hits like “Gentle Ben,” “Daktari” and other Ivan Tors Production stars. Like Rivers, Kirshner eventually tired of Gordon’s goal obsession, telling him to get lost by diminishng contact with him. Kirshner’s loss here. He, Gordon and Tors would’ve made millions by milking their varied talents. Undaunted, Gordon went on to try to introduce television to South Africa during the height of apartheid in the early 1970s. Small of body mass, unable to scratch his own nose, Gordon rarely dreamt small.
* Not surprisngly, I second this initiative to create an Oscar for best soundtrack. Not that Gordon would have won for his early work on “Plan 9 From Outer Space” or other campy sci-fi projects. But hasn’t the time come to recognize artistry where it’s been neglected. Besides, we now have nine best picture nominations. Bring on a new category!
When I was 13, my mother took me to see what felt like an oddly grownup film for a young boy. The movie’s title was “The Other Side of the Mountain.” The inspirational story about a peppy, girl-nextdoor-ski phenom who broke her neck at a time when most people couldn’t pronounce the word paralysis rattled strangley inside of me. Even as a kid, I felt faint seeing how a healthy person could become a seemingly fragile invalid with just one tragic misstep. Just one bad move. But Jill Kinmont refused to waste away in bed or wallow in self pity in some alpine sanitarium now that she had no chance to win an Olympic medal — or even walk to the grocery store. She turned herself into a teacher, an advocate, and not a martyr, from her wheelchair. How could I have known that in buying me a ticket (and snacks) to see her story on the big screen, my mother was preparing to tell me the story of her kid brother, Gordon Zahler, the subject of my first book, Wheeling the Deal: the Outrageous Legend of Gordon Zahler, Hollywood’s Flashiest Quadriplegic?
Gordon died the year the movie came out. Until then, I had wanted nothing to do with him. Today, I consider him about the coolest, bravest person I know this side of my own family mountain. I also consider Jill Kinmont just as important a role model for the disabled as Christopher Reeve. It’s just that her story unfolded in a different age — a less mediafied one.
From the L.A. Times obituary:
“Jill Kinmont Boothe was the national women’s slalom champion and on the cover of Sports Illustrated when she set out to win a 1955 race that would help put her on the U.S. Olympic ski team. As she sped down a Utah mountain slope, she lost control on an icy bump, struck a spectator, crashed and tumbled into a tree.
When she finally came to a stop, she couldn’t feel anything. This must be death, she later recalled thinking. Her neck broken, she was paralyzed below her shoulders, her promising career as a skier over at 18.
But Kinmont Boothe became a role model of a different sort, the subject of a book and two Hollywood films, a teacher and a painter who refused to let her crippling injuries turn her into a different person.
She died Thursday at a hospital in Carson City, Nev., said Ruth Rhines of the local coroner’s office. Rhines could not confirm reports that Kinmont Boothe died of complications related to surgery. She was 75.
A Los Angeles native, she was born Feb. 16, 1936, and in her early teens moved with her family to the Owens Valley, where her father ran a dude ranch in Bishop in the shadow of the Eastern Sierra. She learned to ski at nearby Mammoth Mountain and in 1954 won both the national junior and senior slalom championships
Adding to her appeal, she was, in the words of 1950s press accounts, a “plucky, pretty” blue-eyed blond — the mid-century ideal of young womanhood.
“Everybody that I knew at that age thought Jill was about the cutest thing around; she really was a beautiful young lady and a phenomenal skier,” said Alan Engen, a former U.S. ski competitor and ski historian who met Kinmont Boothe as a young racer. “At the time that she had her accident, she was probably the premier up-and-comer women’s U.S. skier.”
Her crash before several thousand spectators at the Snow Cup giant slalom race in Alta, Utah, made headlines. When she returned to Southern California on a stretcher after two months in a Salt Lake City hospital, crowds of reporters and cameramen greeted her at the train station.
We all know that my big-dreaming, veggie-bodied quadriplegic uncle, Gordon Zahler, helped cut his post-production teeth supplying overbearing, background music to Ed Wood Jr.’s universally condemned/cult beloved science fiction “thriller” Plan Nine From Outer Space. But two years earlier, just around the time he probably would’ve died from intestinal complications had it not been for a daring, experimental surgery pioneered by the U.S. Veterans’ Administration, Gordon also rounded up the music for Wood’s short, Final Curtain. It was always hard to know what became of this earlier movie, but recently there’s been a turbine of publicity that it was an aborted T.V. pilot. Hold your space aliens: a discovered copy was aired at the Sundance Film Festival!
EndearingNew York Times story about the uncovered footage:
” … The journey was a personal one for Mr. Insalaco. As he explained in an interview before the pilot was screened, he had been introduced to Wood’s films through his great-uncle, the eccentric actor Paul Marco. Mr. Marco played Patrolman Kelton, a k a Kelton the Cop, in several Wood films, including the notoriously awful “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” to which Mr. Marco had taken Mr. Insalaco when he was 6. Their relationship grew after Mr. Insalaco’s father died; so did Mr. Insalaco’s affection for Wood. “There’s something that resonates with audiences, and certainly with me,” said Mr. Insalaco, now 37 and an executive producer at Clear Channel Radio’s KFI in Los Angeles. “I’ve watched them over and over again, and I was interested in them since I was a teenager.” Mr. Marco, who had mentioned “Final Curtain” to Mr. Insalaco numerous times, died in 2006 at 78. Two weeks later Mr. Insalaco found a letter on Mr. Marco’s nightstand detailing Wood’s plans for the pilot. It was to be Part 1 of a television series called “Portraits of Terror,” Wood wrote in the letter, and a print had already been struck. But where was it? …”
So much to think about here I need Criswell for brain de-pressurizing. But if that pilot had gone ahead and Gordon’s kept his numb feet tangled in Wood’s big-hearted, Mickey Mouse productions, he never would’ve gone on to network-status, bigger movies and real adventure. Check out what he did. And remember the book about him, Wheeling the Deal. Two years later, incidentally, Gordon contributed to his third Ed Wood Jr. feature, 1959′s “Night of the Ghouls”. After that, Gordon chased Wood around for the dough he owed him, and Wood went cliche Hollywood deadbeat, blaming the bankruptcy of his production company for his losses.
* I was very heartened to learn that the Motion Picture & Television Fund, which became a financial lifeline for my grandmother and paralyzed uncle after the family breadwinner (my grandfather, Hollywood composer/musician Lee Zahler) died in 1947 from the stress of Gordon’s accident, is now on firmer footing after some tumultuous years. It’s even accepting new nursing home patients. An old editor of Gordon’s, the subject of my first book, Wheeling the Deal, just moved in there, in fact. The MPTF is too glorious, too historic and important to wither away as an institution for industry people in their golden years. It might be one of showbiz’s best inventions, this idea of taking care of your own when others cannot or by choice. Glad the Home has new leadership and semi-open doors again. From the L.A. Times blog:
“Three years after a controversial decision to close Hollywood’s best known nursing home, the Motion Picture & Television Fund has reversed course and said it would immediately begin admitting new residents to the Woodland Hills facility. The decision marks a victory for residents and their families who waged a highly public campaign to fight the fund’s decision in January 2009. Many residents accused the charity of losing sight of its mission to take care of entertainment industry workers and refused to leave, hiring an attorney to block evictions. At the time, the fund’s board members said they had no choice because its facilities were losing millions of dollars and threatening the charity with bankruptcy. On Wednesday, however, MPTF officials said the nursing home’s finances had improved under new management, enough at least to justify admitting residents …”
* California’s multi-decade experiment with redevelopment as a blight-busting tool went kaput with Jerry Brown’s budget recently, and of course the endings across the state would be messy. Unfinished projects, developers left hanging, city halls unable to scrounge up bridge financing for work underway, affordable-housing advocates cursing a blue streak. Why should it be any different than the way urban renewal was regarded during its existence? At L.A. City Hall, where the disenguousness over community redevelopment smelled as rank as some of those Occupy protestors weeks after their last showers, bureaucratic amputation is the theme. From the L.A. Times:
“The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to relinquish control of its redevelopment agency, leaving the task of shutting down hundreds of millions of dollars in activities to some other branch of government. On a 9-3 vote, the council decided to in effect walk away from the agency and 192 employees …”
Bonus: link to some of my many stories about redevelopment in L.A. You’ll find corporate welfare, good intentions gone awry, bond debt, empty anchor developments, nepotism, boosterism and a Santa’s Village. (Note some of these links will be refreshed soon.) Bonus No. 2: When urban renewal-less pols attack: link.
* Wait, Ontario residents want to manage the airport within their own borders? The sheer audacity of it … only contracts next to its ironclad logic. Imagine a city managing its skies. In Southern California, aviation is a political contrivance puppeteered by L.A. City Hall.
L.A. Times poll on the issue. My old story on Ontario International.
As you may have heard between news segments about the supposedly healing U.S. economy and those clever mullahs who run nuclearizing Iran, the primate that once occupied a prime cage in Americans’ hearts has kicked the bucket at the grizzled, pinch-me age of 80. Being a conspiratorial land, some have their doubts, because animals like this typically have much shorter lifespans, let alone ones that have lived that Hollywood high life. From USA Today:
” … “You do understand that this chimpanzee could not possibly have been in these Tarzan films,” says R.D. Rosen, author of a 2008 Washington Post article titled “Lie of the Jungle,” which debunked the authenticity of a different chimpanzee that had been dubbed the original Cheetah. “The idea that this Cheetah could have appeared in these films, had this long career, and now had this wonderful retirement is ridiculous.” …”
We may never know if there were a whole slew of Cheetahs, one replacing the other and not chattering about it in their special language or to the local paparrazi. But this is not just some cute entertainment industry trivia to me. My grandfather, Lee Zahler, was a virtual music machine who composed, orchestrated and played on hundreds of Hollywood movies from the 1920s to his death in the late-1940s. I can’t locate “Tarzan” among his many credits on IMDB, but that doesn’t mean that much because for some industry folks, it’s notoriously incomplete. Check out the projects and serials that Lee did have his hands in (Westerns, war pictures, adventure, crime potboilers) and you’ll see my point. Future posts will focus on the shimmering variety of young superstars he came in contact with in those knock-em-out production days.
Now comes Lee’s son, Gordon, my uncle and the star of my first book, Wheeling the Deal: the Outrageous Legend of Gordon Zahler, Hollywood’s Flashiest Quadriplegic. He broke his neck in a hugely publicized (for the time) accident at John Marshall Junior High in Pasadena in October 1940. Gordon had sprinted down a pad in a small gym during P.E. class that rainy day, bounced off a springboard and tried grabbing gymnast rings set above ever-mounting mats. It went horribly and gruesomely awry, because the malfunctioning springboard catapalted him sideways and he tripped over the mats on his way up without any means to cushion his fall. People there still remember the sickening position of his body. At the time, the rambunctious kids in Gordon’s acrobatic group, who were messing around without supervision but warned not to try anything daring, tabbed their game “Tarzan.” Johnny Weismuller was their matinee hero, and in their heads they were swinging through the vines like him when they reached those rings. If they reached those rings.
Twenty-seven years later, Gordon, by then an impossibly successful Hollywood post-production mini-baron, elevator-music trafficker and round-the-clock idea man who weighed all of 95 pounds when out of his wheelchair, was vacuuming new programs up. A single episode of “Tarzan” was one of them (though not the sample video posted above). I can only imagine the irony and pain and symetry he must’ve felt seeing it run, because he couldn’t after his Tarzan swan-dive. (BTW, the 1967 Tarzan spoke pitch-perfect English for a jungle kid.) Those degrees of separation must feel like collapsing walls if you don’t have a thirst for the future. Thankfully, my overachieving dynamo of an uncle did!
This is sometimes what happens, folks, when successful, long-running shows sputter out. They regenerate like sunglass-wearing amoeba with a slightly altered title. Soon, they bring on fresh cast members, try out-there plots and if they’re not careful, they jump the shark of amusing believability for audiences with impatient TV clickers. In this case, a traditional, live-action sitcom became a cartoon. Anything to wring the last drop of entertainment — and royalty chain — was attempted.
Naturally, one show’s fumes is somebody’s opportunity. My uncle, the subject of my first book, Wheeling the Deal: the Outrageous Legend of Gordon Zahler, Hollywood’s Flashiest Quadriplegic, never squandered an opportunity. Being a crippled businessman in Hollywood, he had no choice. So he often pitched work to aging legends, be it the Stooges’ producers here, “Woody Woodpecker” creator Walter Lantz, “Flipper-Gentle-Ben-Seahunt”-et-al producer Ivan Tors, or the late great black architect, Paul Williams. Gordon served as music supervisor for 24 episodes of the “New Three Stooges,” according to IMDB. The cartoon figures animated here move more in one clip than Gordon could in all the years after his horrific, paralyzing accident in 1940 Pasadena. But he sure learned how to deliver good post-production services and found himself on the coat-tails of a comedic franchise as a result. Enjoy the clip from the episode entitled “The Noisy Silent Movie.”
