Quotes for Today

Some quotes I hope may resonate with you.

Have a new Quotes for Today up on my Substack. As I've mentioned doing this as a way to thank those who have Subscribed. If you are a Subscriber - you should have received an email. Thanks!

Quotes for Today

Some quotes I hope may resonate with you.

"Great men are not born great, they grow great." - Mario Puzo

"First you have to catch the goddamn ball, second, get open." - Bill Belichick

"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." - Carl Sagan

"I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit." - Mel Brooks

No One Knows Anything

Top 5 - Authors Whose Books were Made into Movies

This list was prompted by nothing in particular.

1. Stephen King
2. John Grisham
3. Michael Crichton
4. William Goldman
5. (tie) Peter Benchley (tie) Mario Puzo

Nicholas Pileggi almost made the list.

The Godfather - A Look Back

Fascinating article that looks back on the making of The Godfather. I consider myself a big Godfather fan but there was lots of interesting tidbits that I had never heard of. Pranks among the actors, how the real Mafia boycotted and then embraced the movie, lots of good stuff. The Luca Brasi stuff is great.

The article is a couple years old but it was new to me. HT Betsy's Page

Pedophiles in Hollywood

This story about Corey Feldman's assertion that pedophilia is rampant in Hollywood made me think of something I discussed before on this blog.

A while ago I compared Roman Polanski to Mario Puzo's character Jack Woltz from The Godfather. Now I wonder if Puzo could have just been drawing on a known Hollywood stereotype.

It is both sad and sick to think that this behavior is protected and has been for decades.

Roman Polanski as a Godfather Character

It occurred to me that there are many parallels between Roman Polanski and the fictional Jack Woltz from Mario Puzo's book The Godfather. From the Jack Woltz Wikipedia entry:

In the novel, Woltz is portrayed as a man who has achieved great success in the film industry, having come up from nothing.... It is also revealed that he is a pedophile who routinely molests young girls who audition for his movies, as well as the daughters of some of his actresses. (Although this aspect of the character is left out of the feature, it can be viewed in a deleted scene).

The chronology doesn't quite jibe as the book was released in 1969 and Polanski wasn't arrested for child-rape until 1977. It does make me wonder though. Puzo wasn't above using real people as templates for characters in his books (see Frank Sinatra and Norman Mailer as examples). The inspiration for the pedophile director had to come from somewhere. Was it Polanski (do you really think his rape of the 13-year old girl was his first taste of underage sex?) or is the pedophile movie director that common in Hollywood that it could have been someone else? Polanski was in Hollywood prior to 1969 so he could have been the model for Woltz. It could be someone else or Puzo could have have made the character up out of whole cloth.

The pedophile director in The Godfather used to bother me. I wondered why Puzo would insert such disturbing information that really didn't further the plot. Now I have other questions.

Interesting Mario Puzo Essay

Yesterday morning while looking to see if anyone else had connected Mario Puzo to Norman Mailer - I came across this old book review done by Marion Puzo where Puzo discusses not just Buckley but also Norman Mailer.

Puzo was reviewing William F. Buckley's book The Jeweler's Eye - here are the key paragraphs:

Buckley is condescending even to Norman Mailer, a far more dangerous diversion. He loves Mailer as an artist, he says, because Mailer makes the most beautiful metaphors in the business, "as many as a dozen on a single page worth analyzing." Well, that's pretty good metaphorizing. But Mailer's reaction to that kind of praise will be like that of the chorus girl who received as a birthday present from her millionaire lover a signed photograph of himself.

Readable as it is, "The Jeweler's Eye" could have used some of the Buckley-Mailer debates and TV confrontations. Like a perfectly cast wrestling match, they were a delightful pair. (Buckley, the "English Milord," urbane to the point of snottiness, was the natural villain who drew the jeers of the lumpen-crowd by slyly fouling his opponent behind the referee's back. Mailer, the "Candy Store Kid," was the bulling, honest strongboy who earned the crowd's cheers by fouling his opponent in front of the referee.) Buckley's wit is sneaky, ambiguous, the kind of put-on wit presently labeled as "cool" but which may be chicken (to avoid getting punched in the nose). Mailer is crudely direct, mistakes abuse for wit, and openly invites a punch in the nose. It is, perhaps, no accident that Mailer takes boxing lessons and Buckley rides a motor bike. But that's another medium; perhaps the debates didn't work well in print and so were not used here.

It should be noted that the review was written well before Puzo made a name for himself as the author of The Godfather.

Norman Mailer Dies and I Make a Confession

Literary icon Norman Mailer has died. I'm not sure what to say. I didn't like Norman Mailer.

OK - I know that's a terrible thing to say on the day a person's death is announced but the normal niceties are different for public figures (especially for ones who tried so hard to be public). It's also probably not a wise thing for me to admit given that I consider myself a pretty well read person and yet I've never read any of Mailer's books.

I have read some of Mailer's magazine articles and interviews. They didn't leave me very sympathetic to Mr. Mailer. Oh I'm sure I'll have people who tell me that I must read The Executioner's Song or The Naked and the Dead to truly understand his genius. I'm sorry but the "glory" of those books are lost to me for I doubt I could shake reading them in any but the voice of an egomaniac bully.

Probably a good part of my bias against Mailer comes from Mario Puzo. The character Osano in the book Fools Die is a thinly veiled sketch of Mailer. And from my vantage point it was not a flattering characterization.

Today I flipped open my copy of Fools Die and I came across this paragraph that seemed completely to the point. The narrator talks about an artist working toward "truth":

The truth was that you [the writer / artist] were like a safecracker fiddling with the dial and listening for the tumblers click into place. And after a couple of years the door might swing open and you could start typing. And the hell of it was that what was in the safe was most times all that valuable.

My prejudiced against Mailer probably stems from the fact that his ego never allowed him to see that his safe was sometimes empty. The mental image I have of Mailer is as a Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's vault to see nothing inside but instead of admitting the vault was empty Mailer would go on about the metaphor of the vault as the emptiness of modern life and the coldness of a woman's bosom.

A New Low for Local Sports Coverage

Yesterday I read an article in my local paper - The Worcester Telegram and Gazette. It was a story about how more than a dozen players for the Nashua Pride (Can-Am League) got food poisoning from eating food at Holman Stadium. The story made me think of two things.

First, the food poisoning reminded me of a minor subplot from the Mario Puzo book The Last Don. In the book a gambler had a plan to fix the Super Bowl by poisoning the food brought into the locker room at half-time of the big game. Of course the idea was half-baked and the gambler who came up with it was made to sleep with the fishes on an unrelated matter.

Secondly, and more importantly, the article had this little tidbit:

The first person to get sick felt symptoms of food poisoning on June 28. On average, those affected were ill for four to five days with nausea, diarrhea, stomach cramps and fever. A week later, most had regained full health, including a Telegram and Gazette reporter covering the Worcester Tornadoes.

In case you missed it - one of the people who got sick was a reporter for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette and yet the story I read yesterday in the Telegram and Gazette was from the Associated Press. The Telegram and Gazette had a first-hand source to the story but still they were too lazy or too cheap to write the story themselves.

Truly a new low in local coverage by the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.