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Fight Club exposed at local high school after video posted on YouTube

April 10th, 2008 by Scott Marks

FIGHT CLUB Fall Fashion Catalog
FIGHT CLUB Fall Fashion Catalog

The first rule of Fight Club is you do not post videos of Fight Club on YouTube.

Life imitated art in La Vernia, Texas where a bunch of rascally high school students fought hard to earn their fifteen minutes of fame. Their no-nonsense superintendent Dr. Tom Harvey really came down hard on the boys. “We don’t think this is entertainment or funny,” Dr. Harvey admonished. Why you I oughta…

You mean there’s nothing funny about a group of teens assembling in the bathroom to literally beat the crap out of each other because they saw it in a movie? C’mon! Let the kids have their macho fun. Besides, now that football season is over, how else are young American males supposed going to their brutish hostility?

As reported on WOAI-TV, “Dr. Harvey first heard rumors about these secret fights two weeks ago, but learned they were real after watching them at youtube.com. ‘Criminal complaints will be filed, we will not have it or tolerate it at our school,’” said the good doctor undoubtedly wagging a scolding finger. This guy must be a riot around the water cooler.

Calling it their fight club, these students are mimicking the 1999 David Fincher movie that starred Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. After seeing the video clips on youtube.com, Dr. Harey got a hold of La Vernia Police Chief Bobby Hyatt (no small feat when you consider how ticklish he is) and the high school’s liaison officer.

“My school officer, when she watched the thing, she could tell me every kid who was involved and she knew the voices and these kids actually called each other by names, so you knew who was involved with it,” said Chief Hyatt.

I’m warning you wise guy kids, watch your step or Chief Hyatt will put you on double secret probation.



Photos:
Fight Club stills and Fall Fashion Catalog

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Dig A Hole: Richard Widmark

March 29th, 2008 by Scott Marks

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He burst onto the movie scene with a snarling cackle in Henry Hathaway’s 1947 film noir Kiss of Death. Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo was unlike anything the screen had seen. Udo was a career psychopath who took giddy delight in dispatching a wheelchair-bound granny down a flight of stairs.

Richard Widmark was born on Boxing Day (the Day After Christmas), 1914 in Sunrise, Minnesota. He spent his early years in Princeton, IL before taking acting classes at Lake Forest College. (His initial goal was to obtain a law degree.) After graduating he taught acting at the college until 1938 when he made his New York radio debut in Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories. Five years later he was on Broadway appearing in Kiss and Tell. A perforated eardrum kept him out of the service so Mr. Widmark continued on doing what he did best, acting.

While appearing with June Havoc in the Chicago company of Dream Girl, Widmark answered Hollywood’s call by signing a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. In an interview with the Associated Press, the actor revealed that he almost lost the career-making role of Tommy Udo. “The director, Henry Hathaway, didn’t want me,” the actor recalled. “I have a high forehead; he thought I looked too intellectual.” Fortunately the director was overruled by studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck, but according to Widmark, Hathaway “gave me kind of a bad time.”

The role earned Widmark a best supporting actor nomination and made him an overnight movie star. Between 1947 and 1954 Widmark took on the roles of psychopaths (The Street With No Name, Road House), a two bit hustler (Night and the City), a jilted airline pilot (Don’t Bother to Knock), a racist (No Way Out), a western villain (Yellow Sky), a “smoke jumper” (Red Skies of Montana), numerous military types (Halls of Montezuma, The Frogmen, Destination Gobi and Take the High Ground) and perhaps most precariously, George ‘Foghorn’ Winslow’s father in My Pal Gus. Only a dissolute wretch could spawn a boy like Georgie.

By 1950, Widmark was 20th Century Fox’s star player. That year, Elia Kazan was the first to cast the actor against type in Panic in the Streets. Widmark assumed the role of a physician in pursuit of the film’s plague-infected villain Jack Palance.

No director better understood Widmark’s ardent blend of charisma and combustible uncertainty than Sam Fuller in Pickup on South Street. Widmark plays Skip McCoy, a small time grifter who unwittingly lifts a roll of top secret microfilm, headed for the commies, from a dame on a subway. Fuller’s camera movements are even more agile than usual in order to keep up with the sportive actor. Skip doesn’t care much how he gets his money. When informed that the person paying for the stolen film is a Red, Skip spits back, “Who cares? Your money is as good as anyone else’s.” In the end, his moll must endure a savage beating before McCoy finally takes action against the red menace.

It’s odd that a man of Widmark’s concordant demeanor would wind up making a living playing tough guys. “I know I’ve made kind of a half-assed career out of violence, but I abhor violence,” he remarked in a 1976 Associated Press interview. “I am an ardent supporter of gun control. It seems incredible to me that we are the only civilized nation that does not put some effective control on guns.”

After appearing in 20 successful films at Fox, Daryl F. Zanuck, the man who fought to keep Widmark in Kiss of Death, refused to renew the actor’s contract. As if to add insult to injury Zanuck cast him in a supporting role billed below Spencer Tracy, Jean Peters AND Robert Wagner in Broken Lance. He starred in one other Fuller film while owned by Fox and hated every minute of it. Widmark was forced to appear in Hell and High Water and did not like the fact that his co-star Bela Darvi got her role by sleeping with Zanuck.

It wasn’t all thugs and psychos for Richard Widmark. After breaking with Fox in 1954, Widmark formed his own production company, Heath Productions, and began working for other studios. He found great success as psychiatric clinic chieftain Dr. Stewart McIver, a man convinced that the road to mental stability begins with drapes, in Vincente Minnelli’s hysterical CinemaScope melodrama The Cobweb. (When are they going to release a box set of Minnelli’s ‘Scope melodramas?) Before seeing this film, I never once considered putting my slacks on before my shirt. For me, that’s like putting your socks on before your shoes, but Widmark made it all look so commonsensical.

Widmark tried hard as The Dauphin in Preminger’s St. Joan, tackled social issues (Time Limit and the never ending Judgment at Nuremberg) and appeared to trade in his fedora for a ten gallon hat with a string of “A” westerns (The Last Wagon, The Law and Jake Wade, Warlock) topped off by John Wayne’s The Alamo. The Duke wasn’t crazy about scrawny Widmark in the role of strapping Jim Bowie, but United Artists was insistent.

Henry Brandon, Richard Widmark & James Stewart in John Ford’s Two Rode Together

His strongest role in a 60s western was opposite Jimmy Stewart in John Ford’s Two Rode Together. Both he and Stewart were hard-of-hearing (as well as balding), so the extraordinarily cruel Ford would purposely park his director’s chair far away from them and offer up his directions in a barely audible voice. When neither one of the stars could hear their director, Pappy the barbarian would loudly announced to his crew that after over 40 years in the business, he was reduced to directing two deaf toupees. Better bald and deaf than a sadistic, one-eyed, handkerchief-sucking lush.

His finest work of the decade was in Don Siegel’s tough, pre-Dirty Harry cop thriller Madigan. The film was such a hit, it spawned a short-lived TV series.

He worked consistently throughout the seventies, but with the exception of Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming, there isn’t much worth recommending. By the time he got around to Coma, The Swarm and Hanky Panky, Widmark smelled the decay and with the exception of a few scattered roles, pretty much abandoned acting after Against All Odds (1984).

He remained married to the woman he met while taking drama classes at Lake Forest College. When he wasn’t working, he and his wife playwright Jean Hazelwood lived a life of quiet seclusion alternating between a horse ranch in Hidden Valley, California and a farm in Connecticut. After 55 years together, their love story ended in 1997 with Ms. Hazelwood’s death. They had one child, a daughter named Ann who became the wife of baseball immortal Sandy Koufax.

With Widmark gone, that leaves only one of film noir’s top five male icons (Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, Kirk Douglas and Widmark) still alive. It wouldn’t hurt so bad if there were other around capable of filling their shoes. Who am I kidding? No one will ever fill Richard Widmark’s shoes.

Photos: TWO RODE TOGETHER

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