I'm supposed to do a thriller at Universal, but they want Charlton Heston to play a Mexican.

Interesting bit of little-known cinematic trivia: Plan Nine From Outer Space (1959) and Touch Of Evil (1958) were in production at roughly the same time through the year 1957.  This coincidence is a subtle but signature element of Tim Burton's magnificent comedy biopic Ed Wood (1994), the story of the (in)famous no-budget schlock director with more heart and imagination than actual filmmaking talent.  This coincidence is played upon not only in the famous bar scene in which Ed supposedly meets his hero and role-model, the great Orson Welles, but in a number of stylistic touches in Burton's filming that suggest the connection.

Of course, Ed Wood takes a bit of liberty with Welles supposedly complaining about studio interference leading to the casting of Heston as the Mexican state police narcotics agent Miguel Vargas.  In actuality, it was Welles who had changed the character from an American district attorney, as scripted, to the Mexican.  And Heston agreed to star in the movie only if Welles was directing, when he had been originally hired merely to play the role of the corpulent and corrupt Capt. Ouinlan. On the flip-side, however, Welles did shoot Touch Of Evil mostly at night to avoid the kind of studio interference that plagued both men (lampshaded in Ed Wood by the mostly night-time filming of Bride Of The Monster).  And in the bar scene, Ed complains to a sympathetic Welles about producers recutting his films; a situation the master filmmaker often had to contend with and which became a particular issue over this one movie. So for the most part, the fantasy meeting of the two directors who were polar opposites of one another in terms of ability did carry a note of truth to it after all.

Clean up on the aisles.

Who knew I would end up having such a maddening time this year just trying to keep up with this blog?  A dead screen on my iMac forced me offline for nearly a month while I had to wait for the replacement screen and adapter kit to arrive.  Then just two months later, the iMac died, finally giving up the ghost after eleven years of reliable service.  Not bad for a single computer.  Now I have to pull the hard drive out of it to get to my files and apps.  It should be intact, at least I'm reasonably certain that the killer of my old computer had nothing to do with the drive itself.  Fortunately, I've scored a good used iMac running a better OS and with more memory and storage, so I and this blog will soon be back in regular business.

Obviously, this is a filler post.  But I can also use it to announce some upcoming blog topics: a review of the B-grade science fiction movie Creation Of The Humanoids (1962), which is actually a much better picture than a lot of people give it credit for, and a look at the flip side of Atomic Cinema — a government propaganda movie dramatizing the coordination of a nuclear war.