WESTERN PORTRAITS – STEVE
CARVER’S 23-YEAR LABOR OF LOVE IS A TRIUMPH!
At 11 a.m. on Tuesday,
November 19, 2019, lovers of Western film will converge at The Autry’s Wells
Fargo Theatre for Rob Word's A Word on Westerns, and an event more than two decades in the making, the publishing
of Western Portraits – The Unsung Heroes & Villains of the Silver Screen.
Twenty-three years ago, Steve Carver began shooting portraits of Western
character actors, beginning with the legendary R. G. Armstrong, veteran of
Peckinpah films and TV Westerns, and whom Steve had directed seven times. Next
was L.Q. Jones (four times), then David Carradine (four times).
Steve Carver is, in fact,
much better known to the general public as a director of action films like Capone
(1975), An Eye For An Eye (1981), and Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), than
he is as a photographer. As a child, “Actually
I was more into art, and wanted to become a cartoonist. Then my father bought
for me my first camera when I was eight years old. It was a Brownie box camera.
It had two lenses, the top one you look down upon the viewfinder, and the
bottom lens was the shutter lens that actually took the picture. Cameras were
like magic.” He grew up in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, and in the summers would attend camp, “And they had dark rooms. So, I
was able to actually process the film, and print the negatives that I shot. So, from age eight, 10, all the way up to 12
years old when I became a counselor, I was in a dark room and I was a
photographer.
Henry Silva
“My whole family encouraged
the arts, and encouraged me to go to The High School of Music and Art, which
was in Harlem, in the middle of CCNY (City College of New York). I had to travel an hour and a half on subway
to go to school every day, and an hour and a half back.” He traveled for his college education. “When I
went to graduate school at Washington University in St Louis, I was (studying with) all of the Life and National Geographic photographers that
were working in the Midwest. Clifton Edom, who was the father of
photojournalism, was teaching at the University of Missouri.”
His focus began to change,
“When I did my graduate thesis. I did a film that incorporated a lot of my
photography. I made the transition from still pictures that were telling
stories, to motion pictures that told a whole story. A story that allowed me to
not only earn my degree, but to put the story into perspective. And to have a
greater audience than one that would come and only see my artwork and my
photographs hanging on a wall. To actually enjoy a film, and to applaud, and
then get reviews and have people come back, and want to see the film again and
have reviewers write about it.”
Robert Forster
He applied for, and won,
a fellowship to The American Film Institute.
“I had some great teachers: Frantisek
Daniel, and Tony Villani were my main teachers. I had four mentors that (A.F.I
Director) George Stevens, Jr. gave me, which I was very proud of: Gregory Peck,
and Charlton Heston. And my two director
mentors were George Stevens, Sr., and George Seaton. Those were the people that
I had their home phone numbers, and I could call them up anytime.”
He rubbed elbows with
other greats as well. “I found Alfred Hitchcock in the library at the American
Film Institute after his lecture. I cornered him and asked, ‘Can you tell me
how do you prepare a film?’ And he said, ‘Let me teach you. He sat down with me
at the table and took a piece of paper and showed me how to do a storyboard, drew
these little stick figures, and actually showed me the single, the two-shot,
say the master shot. I played dumb. I knew it already, but he was really great,
putting it down for me.”
At a screening of his
second AFI film, his adaptation of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, starring
Sam Jaffe and Alex Cord, Roger Corman, no stranger to Poe, “Tapped me on the
shoulder and said, ‘How would you like to come and work for me?’” Carver cut
trailers for Corman, and got his chance to direct a feature when Corman assigned
him to direct a female gladiator movie, The Arena, in Rome. “Actually,
the first place he sent me was Israel, to (producer) Menahem Golan's house. I
started to do a storyboard. Menahem looked at me and said, ‘Who taught you
that?’ I said Alfred Hitchcock. He looked at me like, what?”
John Savage
In Rome, making The
Arena at Cinecitta Studios, his neighbor at the next stage was Federico
Fellini. “I would watch him shoot Amarcord. And Federico would come and sit next to me,
watch the girls. He would speak in broken English, how he loved gladiators with
big tits.”
Carver was so busy
directing that he hadn’t touched a still camera in twenty years, until he was
directing 1996’s The Wolves, in Russia.
“I was in Red Square and a gypsy came up to me with a very rare camera that
photojournalists use. It was stolen, and he was trying to sell it to me for 50
bucks, American dollars. I wanted this camera, and my body guard, who was a KGB
agent, got this camera for me in a very unusual manner. He took the guy behind a
kiosk, knocked the guy out, took my money.”
Carver returned to California and, ready for a break from filmmaking,
built a darkroom in Venice called, appropriately, The Darkroom. Calling on his years of experience in labs, his
knowledge skills and painstaking perfectionism – Carver often spends six hours
on a single print -- he became in-demand for collectors, museums and archives,
making new copies from 19th and early 20th century
negatives, shot by master photographers.
L.Q. Jones
Fascinated by the work of
great photographers like Steichen, Weston, Stieglitz, and especially Edward
Sheriff Curtis, famous for his portraits of American Indians, “I decided to
make my own, and to create sets. I was using homeless people that were walking
by my lab at night. I would offer them food and money to sit and to mimic these
old pictures.
“And I would create my
own negatives and my own photographs in order to learn how to do these. Well,
these people weren’t working out because they couldn't stay still. These are
all time-exposures, because in the old days, the film was real slow. So
everybody had to stay very still for several minutes, and they had metal
gadgets that held the person very still when they were taking a picture.” Carver’s next move was to ask actor friends
to pose, and the project was born. His pool-shooting
buddy R.G. Armstrong was his first to pose, and Armstrong encouraged Carver to
make it into a book. He even gave Carver
the book’s original title. “The first title was not Unsung Heroes. It
was called The Dying Breed. When I started to approach some of the
actors, The Dying Breed was a big turnoff.”
R.G. Armstrong
One of the odd things
that can happen with time-exposures is anomalies, or ‘ghosting’. Some are easy to explain, and some are not.
When Carver shot L.Q. Jones, “Bobby Zinner (project historian and wardrobe man)
brought an 1893 Winchester lever rifle that had killed 22. You know, and you touch the gun, and it has
that vibe, a killer vibe. So L.Q. sat in a chair, and the gun was against the
wall and we shot the picture. Bobby took
the gun back.” On another day, “We shot Buddy Hackett. We used the same set, just redressed it, and
we shot Buddy’s picture. In the background, off to the left, there’s a ghost
image of the same rifle. We didn't have
that rifle.”
Buddy Hackett
The first session with
Denver Pyle was even more strange. “The first shooting, Denver was in horrible
shape. We dressed him up, and he had a
tank of oxygen behind him and tubes running out of him. He was on chemo and we
just propped him up and I shot him with 36 exposures, and he just barely got
through the session. When I processed the film, his face was purely white. No
eyes, no mouth, no nose. Just white. He was a ghost. I was horrified. I didn't
have a shot of Denver. I called his wife Tippi and I said, Tippi, is it any way
possible that I can get Denver to come back? I need to shoot him again. She
said, I'll ask Denver. Denver calls me back and says, I'll be back. No problem.
He comes the next day, spitting vinegar. He comes back with his tank,
everything. We dress him up again, put the badge on him. I shoot him again. He’s
totally different. I mean, lots of energy. The pictures are great. His face is
there. His energy is all there.” Denver Pyle died a couple of weeks later. It’s one of the best portraits in the book,
and that is saying a lot.
With this two-decade
project finished, Carver is eager to leave the darkroom, and return to
directing. “What I dread is that the
publisher will want a volume two. I have a lot of actors like Robert Fuller
writing me and saying, when are you gonna call us? I have a couple of film projects in mind. We’ll
see. I’ve got to get out of here first. I’ve got to get another dog.”
The book begins with a
forward by Roger Corman, a preface by Kim Weston, and an introduction by Steve
Carver. There are eighty-two photographic subjects in the book, many of whom
you’ve seen a hundred times, and each accompanied by an illuminating essay and/or
interview by C. Courtney Joyner. Joyner
also wrote the closing essay, Carved on Film: Western Movies and the Faces
that Made Them. The book ends with
detailed filmographies of all of the participants, and acknowledgements. Western Portraits is published by
Edition Olms Zurich.
The list price is $50. It
can be purchased at Dark Delicacies, the Autry Gift Shop, and of course, Barnes
& Noble and Amazon.
‘IT
ALL BEGINS WITH A SONG’ RECEIVES WORLD DISTRIBUTION & U.S. JAN 2020 RELEASE
DATE
The
documentary, which celebrates the unsung heroes of Nashville, its songwriters. Directed
by Chusy Haney-Jardine, the 82-minute film will be handled throughout the world
by Tri-Coast. Among the songwriters
interviewed are Rodney Crowell, Bill Anderson, Bob DiPiero, Shane McAnally,
Brett James, Caitlyn Smith, Brandy Clark, busbee, Desmond Child, and Jeffrey
Steele.
LEGENDS OF THE WEST – A
DEPUTY MARSHAL BASS REEVES WESTERN
By Michael A. Black
Published by Five Star –
Hardcover, $25.95 238 pages
In 1879, in The Indian
Territory which will one day be Arkansas, and pieces of a few other states,
Bass Reeves, legendary former slave turned Deputy Marshall for Judge Parker’s
court at Fort Smith, has a direct assignment from the Hanging Judge: investigate
the activities of a band called The Cherokeos. He agrees, and with his trusty
companion, a Lighthorse Indian Policeman known David Walks as Bear, they are on
the trails of one Donavan, an Irish immigrant turned criminal mastermind who
has left a long and bloody string of crimes in his wake, and has an even more
ambitious misdeed in mind.
Michael A. Black, a
retired policeman who has written thirty novels in various genres, keeps the
telling lively as he cuts back and forth between hunter and quarry, peppered
with humor, some of it pretty raunchy. He even provides an alternate
story-teller, a character named Stutley, fresh from the east and hoping to be
the next Ned Buntline, who is bullied into turning the despicable Donavan into
The Rob Roy of The West.
While author Black does
not endorse the currently popular theory that The Lone Ranger was based on Bass
Reeves, but turned Caucasian, he runs with the idea in this year, the 70th
anniversary of the Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels TV series. There are masks,
and five ambushed Texas Rangers, and even a faithful Indian companion who keeps
calling Bass “Gimoozabie.”
‘LONE RANGER AND THE LOST
CITY OF GOLD’ SCREENS SAT. 11/23 AT THE AUTRY!
Celebrating the 70th
anniversary of the Lone Ranger TV series, the second Lone Ranger theatrical
feature, starring Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels, will screen at the Wells
Fargo Theatre. The film will be
introduced by Native actor & writer Jason Grasl (Blackfeet). It will be followed with an interview with
Clayton Moore’s daughter, Dawn Moore, conducted by Leonard Maltin.
AND THAT’S A WRAP!
Happy Trails,
Henry
All Original Material
Copyright November 2019 by Henry C. Parke – All Rights Reserved
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