Category: Movies and Television

21st Century

Hack had long dreamed of writing a rip-off of Howard Hawks’ 1934 screwball comedy Twentieth Century in which down-at-heel producer Oscar Jaffe (played by John Barrymore) must regain the affections of his estranged protégé (Carole Lombard) to tear her away from movie stardom and bring her back under his control, professional and otherwise. The plot takes place aboard the Twentieth Century Limited, the then-famous nonstop train from New York to Chicago, and it was hilarious from start to finish.

Hack’s problem was that he wanted to update the character of Lily Garland to modern times, but couldn’t think of an actress to model her after until he went through one of his frequent blackout drunks in which he had a graphically disturbing sex dream featuring Beverly Hillbillies star Nancy Kulp. When he awoke days later in a Barstow jail cell, he finally had the key to the story.

The Male Sleaze Rectum

Hack’s favorite novel is Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, which contains a scene in which a thousand dollar bill goes missing, so detective Sam Spade performs a strip search on the femme fatale anti-heroine. The scene was excised from the famous 1941 film version starring Humphrey Bogart (when the notorious Production Code in effect at the time didn’t permit such onscreen shenanigans) but it’s included in the 1931 pre-code adaptation in which the luscious Bebe Daniels is the recipient of the humiliating frisk.

When Hack wrote this rip-off of the Hammet story, he included the pat-down, but he inexplicably made Jonny M. the target of it instead of the female lead (who is physically an exact double for Bebe Daniels). The result is disturbing, to say the least.