Cockfighter Blues

Enjoyed the opportunity to chat with Mike White and Heather Drain about Monte Hellman's Cockfighter on this episode of The Projection Booth podcast. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Charles Willeford, it stars Warren Oates as Frank Mansfield the titular sporting man who lives by a strict code bound to a self-imposed oath of silence he's sworn to uphold until he is awarded the prestigious title, Cockfighter of the Year. The film follows Frank over the course of a cockfighting season working his way across the country, getting in scrapes, running scams and sacrificing everything for his goal, without ever uttering a word. 

The film famously was the first money-loser from producer Roger Corman and was supposedly re-cut with film scraps from other Corman productions inserted to include random nudity, explosions and car chases to be Frank's dreams and add some marketability to the commercial misfire. Though none of us have seen evidence of said producer's cut, Mike did read some amazingly misleading box copy from a vhs edition of Cockfighter released as Born to Kill.

Despite not being a money-maker Corman remained fond of the film, something Hellman was apparently not according to Kier-La Janisse, author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure, a book worth a look if you're interested in Willeford, Hellman, Corman, Oates or cinematic explorations of masculinity, the American rural South and obsession. Also worth checking out; Cockfighter Journal, Willeford's journal during production of the film. 

Onscreen Oates is supported by Harry Dean Stanton, Richard B. Shull, Ed Begley Jr., Steve Railsback, Robert Earl Jones, Laurie Bird, Millie Perkins and Charles Willeford himself in the roll of Ed Middleton, described in his novel as "in his early sixties...he is a big man with a big voice and a big paunch. Except for a bumpy bulbous nose with a few broken blood vessels here and there on its bright red surface, his face is smooth and white, with the shiny licked look of a dog's favorite bone," leading me wonder if he wrote it aspiring to play the role himself a decade later.

Willeford more than holds his own among the stacked cast of character actors and personally I think it's a shame we didn't get more screen roles from him outside of a blink and you'll miss it appearance three years later in Corey Allen's David Carradine starring above average quality hixsploitation cinematic shit-kicker Thunder and Lightning.

The novel, narrated by mute Frank, gives the reader plenty of his thoughts and observations, but the film has no narration and relies on Oates' soulful eyes, impish grin and exaggerated body language to carry conversations while I relied on Heather and Mike to carry ours. I was comfortable doing so because it wasn't our first conversation around an adaptation of a great novel. 

Many episodes earlier we had our first discussion about John Huston's film of Leonard Gardner's Fat City starring Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges and Susan Tyrell. (Check that out here)

For more from Heather be sure to follow her @mondoheather on Twitter and you can pick up The Bizarro Encyclopedia of Film Vol. 1 right here.

For more on Cockfighter, here's me and Johnny Shaw in conversation about Willeford and the films made from his books (Cockfighter, Miami Blues and The Woman Chaser - The Burnt Orange Heresy was not yet made).

The Devil Raises His Own

Thursday, August 15 I'll be interviewing Scott Phillips for the release of his latest novel The Devil Raises His Own. Come on by Subterranean Books at 6pm for the event and be sure to pick up a signed copy of one of his best. I really loved this book.

All of Scott's work is connected through the Ogden family and its illegitimate heirs. Family traits include high intelligence and poor impulse control, scoff-lawism, philandering and a capacity for violence. 

All the characters from The Walkaway and The Adjustment's Wayne Ogden, The Ice Harvest's Charlie Arglist, the actor who played Dr. Crandall Taylor of Rake and Tate Gandy from That Left Turn at Albuquerque are descendants and the Ogden genes even survive into the post-disaster future of RUT in Bridget. Every one of them could trace their confusing assortment of innate skill, ingenuity, drive and stubbornness from their progenitor Bill.  

Bill Ogden first appeared in the 1870-set Cottonwood brushing up against real range serial murderers The Bloody Benders of Kansas and by book's end Bill's up to Ogden shenanigans in San Francisco.

(Read this guest piece by Steve Weddle on Cottonwood)

The next glimpse we got of Bill was as old man Ogden in the short story Bill in Idaho (originally published in the geezer noir anthology Damn Near Dead II and later in Phillips' story collection Rum, Sodomy and False Eyelashes). 

Hop Alley is set in Nebraska and Colorado during the interim of periods of Cottonwood's opening and closing chapters and The Devil Raises His Own finds Bill in Los Angeles with the US gearing up to jump into the Great War across the sea. 

(Read this guest piece by Thomas Wickersham on Hop Alley)

(Read this guest piece by Peter Rozovsky on the Bill Ogden books)

Over the course of his misadventures with murderers, swindlers, gamblers and pornographers Bill comports himself with elan commendable for a man half his age with a fixed moral north as he fornicates, hustles and improvises his way through some of the young nation's unseemliest  moments. 

Scott's kicking off a book tour for The Devil Raises His Own (my favorite novel of his since The Adjustment) next week in Los Angeles and will be on the road through September 12. Find him at 

Chevalier Books in Los Angeles in conversation with Gary Phillips (no relation!) August 12

Subterranean Books in St. Louis in conversation with me August 15

SoHo Crime Presents: The Lineup virtual event with James R. Benn and Michael Sears August 20

The Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas in conversation with Kelly Barth August 21

Watermark Books in Wichita August 22

The Poisened Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona with Eli Cranor August 28

Murder By the Book in Houston with Steve Hamilton September 7

Off Square Books in conversation with Ace Atkins September 9

Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee in conversation with Tim Hennessy September 12

There's No Place Like Homme

Had my hair properly blown back this week by Femme the feature debut of directorial team Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping. The erotic thriller stars Nathan Stewart-Jarrett in a real career-making turn as Jules, a London drag performer who embarks on a bold revenge mission after being assaulted on the street one night by a sexually insecure thug named Preston played with a live-wire in his teeth by George MacKay. 

The path chosen for Jules' self-reclamation presents itself in a bath house where he encounters Preston months later. Sans makeup and drag attire he seduces his attacker and follows him to his own flat where they are interrupted by the return home of Preston's loutish unsuspecting drug-dealing mates and a hasty improv act makes partners of the pair who arrange to meet again later in a safer place. 

Over an extended period Jules' and Preston's relationship develops and complicates, roles change and motives muddle and both characters find themselves challenged and perched at the precipice of real change before the climax. I was fully invested in this one thanks to all the elements; story, performance and style. Just firing on all cylinders here. 

Haven't seen the 2021 short film it's a feature treatment of, but I'll be looking for it as well as whatever's next from Freeman and Ping.

Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay should both become household names based on the performances they gave in Femme. I didn't know either name, so I looked 'em up. Turned out I'd just watched Stewart-Jarrett in another film about a sexual outsider, Lucas Heyne's Mope based on the true story of Stephen Hill a troubled man whose pursuit of fame as a pornstar ended violently. 

Hill performed low-quality porn under the name Steve Driver and never achieved the recognition he craved enough to commit himself to the role of 'mope' in specialty videos. Mopes in porn are the performers who will do the most degrading acts that other performers draw the line at and, if the movie is to be believed, Hill believed his hard, dirty work would pay off one day if he stuck with it. 

But it didn't. 

Despite his commitment to the grind, his pursuit of gimmicks and his partnership with another mope, Herbert Wong who performed as Tom Dong. The duo talked themselves up as "the Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker of porn," a gimmick that somehow never got them the DVD cover careers they craved. 

Notoriety only came when Hill was fired from his bottom-rung gig and attacked his film crew with a prop Samurai sword, killing one and wounding two others. Days later Hill was killed trying to escape capture by police. 

The true story is tragic, but the film plays like a Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly comedy about delusional losers who will go to any length to never know the truth about themselves and... it probably reflects poorly on my character, but I thought it worked. 

I laughed quite a bit. 

Femme and Mope are about as tonally different as they can be, but as soon as I realized that Stewart-Jarrett was the star of both films the similarities in theme stood out. 

And then I found out where else I'd seen George MacKay - as Ned Kelly in Justin Kurzel's punk-rock bushman flick True History of the Kelly Gang.

Oh shit!

Now I'm picturing Nicholas Hoult naked on a bordello couch confronting MacKay's hyper-masculine pugilist Ned with the simple question; "Ever fuck in a dress?" And yeah, Femme, Mope and True History of the Kelly Gang might make for a helluva triple bill.

Side bar: 2024's been a good year for the queer crime films with Femme currently the third holding an almost certain to make my top ten of the year slot. 

Love Lies Bleeding, the sophomore feature from Rose Glass, got some attention for its bold style and stellar cast including Kristen Stewart, Ed Harris, Dave Franco, Jena Malone and head-turning newcomer Katy O'Brian. Stewart stars as the going-nowhere daughter of desert kingpin Harris punching the clock at a gym, one of her father's straight businesses, when O'Brian's drifter breezes into town and locks eyes with her.

First the sexual connection between the two disparate desperate souls unlocks desire for other areas in their lives, then taking action toward once stuck in static goals bursts dams of potential and a whole lot of bloodshed takes place. The closing credits sequence is fucking wonderful and makes me think this thing would play well on a double bill with David Lynch's Wild at Heart. I should revisit Glass's debut Saint Maude, which I liked, but don't recall much in specific (other than the climax).

Finally, I fucking loved Ethan Coen's Drive Away Dolls, his first sans-Joel directorial effort and the first of a proposed trilogy of 'lesbian genre projects' co-written and produced with his wife Tricia Cooke. Apparently, I was in the affectionate minority of this one's audience who were perhaps appalled by the low-brow humor and cheapie-energy and style the picture wears proudly around its neck beneath the creator's high-brow Oscar crowns. 

I, for one, applaud the 'getting back to my indie, made my first pictures with Sam Raimi, roots' spirit of this thing. The humor is obvious, the spirit it free-wheeling and I suspect the broad sides of barns are in peril, but my sides were split and my grin was fixed and has not faded. 

Margaret Qualley's performance may recall Nicolas Cage's in Raising Arizona for subtlety and spirit, but she knows the assignment and is all-in on this one having nothing to prove after her turn in the equally-sexually charged, but somewhat sublimated Denis Johnson adaptation from Claire Denis Stars at Noon and I hope that Geraldine Viswanathan has a third entry on the way after Jake Szymanski's The Package to round out a trilogy of films she stars in concerned with the recovery of a dis-embodied penis.

Messing with Mr. Inbetween

I was pretty stoked to not only cover Mr. Inbetween, one of my favorite-ever crime shows, on the Watch with Jen podcast, but for the opportunity to interview creator and star Scott Ryan. Such a personally gratifying thing to be a part of. Big thanks to Jen Johans for having me on. The episode starts off as a conversation about Mr. Inbetween with Jen, Rob Belushi and me before we're joined for the interview by Blake Howard.

I wrote about my enthusiasm for Mr. Inbetween on this blog three years ago during its third and final season on F/X (streaming on Hulu) and now that it's finished, I'm even more enthusiastic about it. The final episodes really played out the themes incredibly richly and just, y'know, stuck the landing the way you're always hoping the great things do. Think I've watched the whole show through five or six times by now and it keeps revealing layers and themes I'd somehow missed before. 

It's not only one of the funniest and most heart-breaking shows I've ever seen, but I'm hard-pressed to think of an example of gnarlier TV violence. Gorier? Okay. Grosser? Yeah, of course, but violence that can turn your stomach with its cold, brutal bluntness and lack of affectation and style? I'm drawing a blank. Yet, it's still a show I would recommend to normal folks. You don't have to be a basement crazy noirhead to dig it. 

Anyway, I'm still recommending Mr. Inbetween to people who've somehow not even heard of it two years after this interview. Trust me, you're gonna love it.

For anybody interested, I put together a Letterboxd list of the films I watched in preparation for the episode which included all the Blue Tongue films I could get ahold of, the short films of Nash Edgerton (who directed every episode of Mr. Inbetween) and other Australian crime films featuring cast members, and especially films directed by cast members (I think Ryan and Edgerton enjoyed casting directors as actors and really abusing them onscreen).  I revisited Ryan's own The Magician a couple of times and of course Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, and André Bonzel's Man Bites Dog which Mr. Inbetween owes a lot to. Most of Edgerton's shorts can be found on youtube and a few of them are on Hulu as well.

Code 46

Back in the late nineties and early aughts my favorite filmmakers tended to be those uncommitted to a signature style, whose range was broad in scope and whose accomplishment was evenly dispersed across a multitude of genres and tones. Alan Parker was an early favorite, Steven Spielberg too. Steven Soderbergh really grabbed my attention early in the 90s with the very stylish Kafka and the slick indie Sex, Lies & Videotape which he followed up with King of the Hill, The Underneath (his remake of Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross) and the losing his movie mind Schizopolis; each picture stylish in different ways and confident at various volumes. 

Rising roughly in tandem to Soderbergh on the other side of the Atlantic English filmmaker Michael Winterbottom wouldn't really arrive on my radar until his Thomas Hardy adaptations Jude and The Claim treated me rough, but memorably, and I started to look for what else he was up to. He followed up The Claim with 24 Hour Party People, the flashy, funny biopic of Tony Wilson and the Manchester music scene's evolution over a fifteen-year period. It was his first feature to star his longest-running collaborator Steve Coogan, but before they took The Trips Winterbottom dropped the near-future sci-fi romantic thriller Code 46 starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. 

And I think it's a low-key masterpiece. 

The story about Robbins' fraud investigator called to Shanghai to find a forger operating inside a large multi-national company producing travel papers for restricted people. He uses an empathy virus to help him intuit things about people and when he meets Morton's forger he is immediately smitten and lies to his clients about the identity of their black marketeer. The pair spend his single night in Shanghai celebrating her birthday and beginning a love affair that has tragic results. 

If you think it sounds like William Gibson writing a Graham Greene story than you and me are in agreement and if that sounds like a heady proposition to you, let me assure you that it is. In fact you can listen to me talk quite a lot about what I enjoy and appreciate about it on this episode of the Projection Booth with Mike White and Dylan Davis. The episode includes interviews with Code 46 screenwriter and frequent Winterbottom collaborator Frank Cottrell-Boyce and producer Andrew Eaton.

Winterbottom has had a long and prolific career, and I've moved on to my crime obsession, so our paths have less-often intersected than I thought they might for a few minutes there in the early aughts. I do really dig his Jim Thompson adaptation The Killer Inside Me and I'd still love to follow Dev Patel's character from The Wedding Guest through a short franchise's worth of adventures and holy hell his producing of the Red Riding Trilogy based on the David Peace novels remains one of the best projects of the 21st century, so I still have an eye on his output, just nothing as intensely as I did after Code 46.

If I were looking to compliment the sci-fi vibes of Code 46, I'd say it's got DNA in common with... Blade Runner, Boarding Gate, Children of Men, Demonlover, Gattaca, Minority Report, New Rose Motel and Until the End of the World. Do with that what you will.

Heroic Perverts

Reading a lovely and beautiful wisp of a book punching above its wordcount weight on my front porch in the oppressive heat of July last week and found innerworldly cool relief from the briny breeze with every turn of the page. S.L. Coney's Wild Spaces is a tentacle horror, coming of age, southern gothic/rural noir adjacent heartbreaker that I'll be thinking about for a long time (and if you think that genre combo sounds like a gas please check out Chad Crawford Kinkle's Jug Face or Laura Benedict's The Devil's Oven, maybe Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs). 

Anyway, it got me thinking about themes of transformation transcendence, transgression, evo/devolution and adaptation which inevitably lead me to think of David Cronenberg. If you're a fan you might check out the anthology of essays and short fiction inspired by the earliest films of his, Children of the New Flesh edited by Chris Kelso and David Leo Rice. 

You can read my interview with Rice about the book at Southwest Review. I was particularly pleased with his definition of and ruminations on Cronenberg's use of the heroic pervert archetype. The heroic pervert is easily plugged into science fiction and supernatural horror, but its often effective in more crime blog-relative spaces like drug fiction, gutter stuff and generally transgressive fiction.

I wouldn't call Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World crime though some of the stories touch its outer boundaries, but I recently enjoyed following her heroic perverts on their downward spirals and knuckleball pitches. I haven't read her crime novel Eileen, but I did catch William Oldroyd's adaptation starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway and I'd be happy to see everybody involved continue down the dark path (really need to see Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth too - Johnny Shaw recommended it here).

Sara Gran's Holistic Detective Agency

Recently had occasion to recommend a detective novel to someone without any real idea of their taste and the first thing that came out of my mouth was Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran. Didn't think about it till the next day what a strange one that was to take off the top of my head. I think it might have been because there's something for everybody in it. Of course, there's a lot for everybody to be turned off by too. It's traditional, but it's very weird, it's cerebral, and it's explosively violent. It's definitely not boring and Claire DeWitt is a series character who doesn't outstay her welcome - only three books (so far).

Anyway, I'm a big fan of Sara Gran and I'd like you to be too. Here's something I wrote for another site way back when Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead was first released in 2011.

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Here’s a blurb from Lee Child on Sara Gran’s amazing 2006 novel Dope:

“If Raymond Chandler knew then what we know now, he might have written a book like this”

It was a classic hardboiled detective novel set in the romantic era that Chandler wrote in but had the gilt-edging stripped away with the perspective benefit of fifty years’ remove. Well, brothers and sisters, with the release of her latest, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, I pose this question: could Chandler have written anything like this even with a fifty-year forward-glimpse? Answer: I doubt it.

No slight to Chandler, gawsh I love his stuff, but it’s kinda refreshing to read an American PI novel where his ghost hand is not immediately visible, hovering over the author’s. Claire DeWitt is the most bracingly original fictional sleuth I’ve seen in years, which is not to say that her influences aren’t apparent, (some Nancy Drew here, some Columbo there, a touch of Holmes, and some Sam Spade too) only that her particular cocktail of parentage has so many previously antithetical and adversarial qualities packed snugly into her frame and sounding cozy behind her first person narrative, you’re going to get dizzy trying to keep up. She’s terribly new-agey, knows the I Ching, combs through her own dream interpretations for clues and is so sharply spiritually tuned, she’d shame Dale Cooper and Dirk Gently even if they teamed up against her in an intuit-off. On the other hand she’s also an angel-dust-smoking, tattooed, gun enthusiast, hand to hand fighter and generally just kind of a badass – “I’d shot four people. I’d killed two. None were in self-defense.” (Check out Sara’s blog The Abbott Gran Medicine Show that she keeps with Megan Abbott for more on the origins of Claire DeWitt.)

She sees her vocation as a detective as nothing less than her sacred duty and moral destiny and speaks so earnestly about her desire to ‘solve mysteries’ that at first I cringed. It was like listening to my favorite band discuss openly their desire to ‘be cool’ and proven strategies toward that goal. I want my rock stars to be cool without ever addressing it, and yeah, I generally appreciate some tasteful reluctance on the part of my investigators, but Gran bids us immerse ourselves in Claire’s world, and who am I to resist? That world (this time out) is New Orleans, so regal in its ruin and exotic in its very Americanism (N.O. has always been our national funhouse compact mirror), and Claire changes its already charged atmosphere simply by entering it. She’s come to town to find a missing person who disappeared in the storm (yeah, this is 2007) and once accepted, she’s prepared to solve the case and uncover the truth regardless of who is hurt, angered or exposed by it.

She takes as a matter of course that no one really wants her to find the truth (nevermind what they say or think). She’s prepared to be unpopular because she’s committed Detection by Silette, the voice crying out of the wilderness that all elect investigators understand to be their very own guru-prophet-philosopher-L. Ron Hubbard to memory and faithfully adheres to the wisdom and guidance it provides. The origins of Silette and his near impenetrable tome are mysterious themselves and a good deal of Claire’s backstory revolves around the sisterhood she founded with two childhood friends when they discovered the book, hidden away like the object of great power from any classical myth, and decided to become detectives. Twenty years later, one of them has disappeared and Claire is estranged from her remaining former companion. Her back-story is at least as intriguing as the central, forward-moving case, but reserves resolution for a later date, and I suspect that it is this over-arcing storyline that will be the real hook for the series.

Bringing together the mystery element of Dope and the touch of the supernatural that played a more prominent role in her first two novels, Saturn's Return to New York and Come Closer, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is perhaps the most distilled essence of Granishness we’ve yet been privy to, and I can’t wait for another shot of the hard stuff.

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The DeWitt adventures Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway and The Infinite Blacktop followed and I have reason to hope there will be a fourth Claire DeWitt title someday. 

Meanwhile I've got The Book of the Most Precious Substance sitting on my shelf waiting for the right moment to surprise me with whatever the fuck its deal is.