So it goes...

Good Work, No Matter What

So a warm welcome to you and the first of my weekly ramblings on Movies - old & new - with the occasional dash of music, culture and the arts to add a little spice & flavour.

A quick heads up… I’ll always be straight with you, never pander or condescend to you, and will probably employ ‘bad’ language here and there because I want to try and write how I talk, but the main thing is to share shit with you you’ll hopefully find interesting, enlightening, and entertaining.

Ok, lets go.

So for the inaugural sashay into the world of Substack (and writing anything at all for public consumption!) let’s kick off with a randomly chosen Actor and a couple of his movies - one so iconic it almost transcends Film, and another nowhere near so well known but worthy of your interest.

ROY SCHEIDER… was a working class kid out of New Jersey who ended up trading boxing for drama studies and after a spell in the USAF as First Lieutenant in Air Operations ended up gaining his first movie role in an absolute turd of the highest order called ‘The Curse Of The Living Corpse’ (1964). He was on his way though.

I’ll get to JAWS in a minute and of course there were important roles in important movies before THE SEVEN-UPS gave him his first starring role in 1973, but it’s this rarely screened and therefore rarely seen movie that I’d urge you to take a look at.

Scheider is a crusading Cop and leader of the ‘Seven-Ups’, a squad of plainclothes officers who use dirty, unorthodox tactics to snare their quarry and get ‘em banged up for seriously lengthy sentences. Produced by the guy behind ‘Bullitt’ (1968) and ‘The French Connection’ (1971) it’ll be no surprise to learn that this action-thriller contains a brilliant car chase sequence by legendary stunt coordinator and driver Bill Hickman (the guy behind the iconic car chases in the aforementioned movies also). Seven-Ups is worth the price of admission for Hicks’ superb work alone frankly, but the movie has a lot more to it than that. Sonny Grosso was a former NYC Cop and the basis for the book that became ‘The French Connection’, then went on to become become a technical advisor on Friedkin’s multi-Oscar winner, ‘The Godfather’ (1972) and ‘The Seven-Ups’, and you can feel his input, influence and affect on the authentic feel in all these classics. Basically there’s numerous strong credible connections between The Seven-Ups and some of the finest movies not just of the 70’s but EVER!

Anyhow, I won’t be waffling away at length ‘n large on here each week as that’s not the point of this thing, I’m here to hopefully tee you up to want to go watch something for the first time or maybe go back and watch something you haven’t seen in a long time through the prism of the intervening years and where you are now. So here’s the Trailer:

Lord knows where you can stream it but you can at least buy it on DVD at Amazon.

So now to a movie we ALL know and many of us not only love so much we’ve watched many many times but which is up there amongst our favourite movies of all time - JAWS (1975).

The story goes that Scheider overheard Spielberg talking about the movie to another screenwriter at a party in L.A. and made a beeline for the young director there and then to find out more about this shark flick. Initially Spielberg wasn’t keen on Scheider though due to his tough guy image in ‘Klute’ (1971), ‘The French Connection’ and ‘The Seven-Ups” - but - Scheider won him round and ‘Chief Martin Brody’ was his. This fabulous Actor went on to have a stellar career with brilliant performances in classics such as ‘Marathon Man’ (1976), ‘Sorcerer’ (1977), ‘All That Jazz’ (1979) collecting two Oscar nominations along the way, and thus leaving in his wake a fantastic cinematic, artistic and personal legacy.

And so almost finally for this first week and first attempt (stick with me, I hope to improve) I’m pretty active on Twitter clipping Movies, Documentaries as well sharing my interests in Stand-Up Comedy, Photography, Literature & The Arts (as well as Animals, Nature & Architecture) and this week I was thrilled that a letter I tweeted by the wonderful KURT VONNEGUT went super-viral. The sentiment and message in this letter is genuinely inspiring, beautiful and I’m so chuffed that his words reached as many millions as Twitter’s analytics tell me it has. This is why I’m on Twitter, this is where Twitter can be a medium for such good - the sharing of great ‘stuff’ that lifts and lightens, inspires & informs when so much of the world seems to be turning to shit.

And so finally finally… this week was the 28th anniversary of Portishead’s classic Album ‘DUMMY’ (1994). I was a Drama Student at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School from ‘93 to ‘95 and so in Bristol just at the time the music scene there exploded with bands and artists such as Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky and what would come to be known as ‘Trip hop’. I remember going to the Arnolfini and Watershed cinemas in Bristol city centre and finding short films made by Portishead popping up almost as trailers before the main movie, as well as the serious buzz in Bristol as the music world turned it’s head toward the South West of England. ‘Dummy’ is an extraordinary album, very cinematic and soundtrack-like, so if you’re a cinephile or movie lover and you’re not that familiar with it I heartily recommend you sample it on Spotify or iTunes, give it a whirl.

So, there’s my first stab at this, I hope it offered you something of something, and I'll see you next week with another dollop of whatever’s going on in my mind re Movies - and maybe a touch more.

P.S. - please don’t feel obliged but am still recovering from a disastrous 2 years when my industry shut down - especially those of us who work in the Theatre - so if you enjoyed the above you can support me on Ko-Fi:

https://ko-fi.com/michaelwarburton