SmokeSignals

No two ways about it, the famous editor was fried. Doing too much phone had finally done in his brain. No big thing normally, but his reader was sick this week, and his famous author had to have an answer, but ye gads, he couldn't read his meal ticket's writing anymore! Matter of fact, he couldn't read the letter he got from his mother the week before, or the article in the famous magazine that quoted him talking about his famous meal ticket. But at least he had the good sense to have the article scanned for his name, so he did catch the sentence illuminated in yellow magic marker where he was glibly quoted explaining that sales were down because, "People just don't read anymore."\

He was now a testament to his own testimony. Counted among the growing number of people not just in the publishing business, but in the entire infotainment industry, who have dyslogia, which, for the uninitiated, is a mild, yet quite serious eye to brain reading (listening-viewing) dysfunction which is on the verge of literally becoming an intellectual epidemic.

Caused primarily by infomania, which is the obsession to collect more and more information without making any distinction in its value, the untalked about downside of the technology boom is that everyone in the content end of the Biz has been forced to overload their poor unprepared human hard drives without being taught how to download what they've already taken in and are no longer using.

Right now, for instance, a lot of people are going through dyslogia without even knowing it, because it happens gradually, not suddenly, which is the main reason it's so difficult to detect. And once they have it they don't talk about it because it's too embarrassing, and they think it's them, not the effects on them of the system in which they're working. So just like the Peter Principle explained how people are naturally promoted out of their competence - as one moves up in the Biz, the amount of germane duties they actually have to perform move down, reading among the people who actually make decisions about books and movies, is something their underlings do. Executives do phone and they do lunch and they do fine.

It's a well known fact that people in decision making positions in the Biz have readers who read the work and write coverage on it for them so they can talk about the scripts as if they actually read them themselves. Certainly in the movie business, as novelist Gerald Green's famous Harry Cohn story testifies, it's always been a cretin's picnic. Green was of course accorded the whole nine yards when Cohn bought his novel all those years ago; flown out to Bimbowood, put up in what might be considered tres-tres ostentatious digs, he was immediately wisked to the studio and ushered in to meet the mogul himself. The moment Green walked through the door, Dirty Harry leaped up out of his chair and embraced him, then began pounding him on the back, as he oozed, "Young man, young man, I actually cried, cried real tears when my secretary read me the synopsis of your novel."

Is this an exaggeration? I'm not sure, but probably not. I talked to a lit agent in New York recently who quite openly boasted "I read everything I sell, but not until I sell it." Then not long after that, a once famous but now somewhat fading editor-in-chief who I had read for at the height of his career, asked for a novel of mine. Six months later, when I hadn't heard from him I started calling him. He never returned my calls, but one day, probably while his secretary was in the bathroom, he answered his own phone. I identified myself and asked him whether he had had a chance to read the novel yet. "Uhhh, I don't know," he stammered. "I'll have to ask."

Is this an exaggeration? Definitely not. My first experience with dyslogia was even more moving & pathetic. I was in an agent's office in Beverly Hills, in the early 90s. The woman had had a screenplay of mine sitting on her desk for close to a year. It had been given to her by her lawyer, who had recommended she take me on as a client. Unfortunately, even though she knew three months in advance that I'd be in town on this preordained day, she hadn't been able to read the script. Of course she could've given it to her reader, but she couldn't give it to her reader, she explained, as she looked around at the wall-to-wall piles of manuscripts stacked from the floor, 12 feet up to the ceiling, surrounding my chair on three sides. I noticed the only place there were no manuscripts was in back of her desk, where there was a window that dropped six floors down to a parking lot. I suddenly imagined the agent hyperventilating, which wasn't difficult to do, because as she explained to me that she had found out her reader was filing false reports, she started gasping for breath. She stood up, turned and faced the window - for a moment I imagined she was going to jump. Later, she confessed she did too. But it was merely transcendental hyperventialtion, a malady that is much like momentary rapture of the deep, and has become the new Epstein-Barr Syndrome of the Infotainment industry.

When she turned around the agent started crying. Her reader, she confessed, was telling her that scripts submitted to her were no good, then taking them to a studio on his own, and claiming he was the agent. From what she said, I gathered it was starting to happen all over town. Ambitious young sharks were cutting the legs out from under their mentors, and there wasn't a damn thing anybody could do about it other than take six months off, and hope the dyslogia cleared up and they had enough flour left over in the barrel to open a Burger Chump franchise when they got back to hell. Because once you're out of the Biz, you're out of the Biz.

Ask any agent trying to beat the cost of postage down that long winding hall to development hell, and what you'll see is not a pretty picture. And like the news of the day, it never ends. Deals go down where even chumps fear to tread, but words, ah words, they just keep going across the page until they go out of focus, and the eyes roll back in the head for a little siesta. . . Then the phone rings, and it all starts over again.

Without a shadow of a doubt the hippest dicitonary you can find is too lame to define hip. Anyway, hipsters are hep, not hip. Or at least according to the dictionary definitions, which all sort of hem and haw, not wanting to be caught showing their well informed, but stylish cube, in case a real hipster is looking it up. Of course a real hipster would never look it up; if you have to ask I can't tell you is the line that pretty much defines the state of the understatment. In short, people who talk about it are on the far end of the Adoption Curve, so by the time whatever it is that they think it is gets to them, it's already over and being reinvented back at the source.

Only one underground figure has ever come through that mundane mulch after crossing over the bridge into the mainstream miasma and come back to the cognescenti with his edge intact. I speak of the real Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Terry Southern himself, American screenwriting's high priest of hiposie, Godfather of Head Lit, and galloping guru of what lengths the twisted postmodern psyche will go thru just to get off.

On October 29th, 1995, Southern finally got off for good, passing away at St. Luke's Hospital, in Manhattan, of a respiratory ailment. While lying there waiting for the inevitiable his last words (to his son Nile) were, "What's the delay?" He had collaposed four days earlier while on the way to teach a screenwriting class at Columbia University.

The major bridge between the black humor and beat aesthetic, Southern was a co-screenwriter of such classic films as Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964), and Easy Rider (1969), and also worked on The Loved One (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Barbarella (1968) and The End Of The Road (1970), which he also produced. His books included the novel Candy (1958), which he wrote jointly with Mason Hoffenberg; the novels Flash and Filigree (1958), The Magic Christian - for which he also wrote the script (1959), Blue Movie (1970), and Texas Summer(1992); and Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (1967), a collection of short fiction and other writing, as well as Virgin (an illustrated history of Virgin Records - 1995).

This interview started in February of 1989, and went on in numerous different sessions into 1992. I'd been trying to interview him for months for an article I was writing about Maurice Girodias and Olympia Press, but hadn't had much success reaching him until he called out of the blue one day from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, and said he wanted to talk. I imagined I was about get one of those truly weird, bizarre ritualistic death bed confessionals, but everything was benign that time, buffs, and Southern wasn't close to digging himself the deep six just yet. In fact, when we met he looked as chipper as he did on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonelyheart's Club Band. We talked for about four hours that night, then just as I was about to leave he whipped open his bathrobe like a world class flasher who's just been discovered by The Wide World of Sports, and with impeccable timing asked, "Want to see my scars?"

We met at least a dozen times over the next few years, talked often on the phone, and even more often he left long, wildly funny (duck) messages on my machine about other writers he admired and the act of writing itself. "The important thing about writing," he once said, "is the capacity to astonish." And his worked proved that was certainly his trademark. As this interview shows he obviously had more than a few things he wanted to get off his chest. At one point, after he agreed to work with me on a mini-series based on my article on Paris in the 50s, I asked him if he minded if we fictionalized that portion of his life. Without missing a beat, he said, "My life is fiction."

TERRY SOUTHERN: It dragged on because a lot of times we were in different places. He would be in the south of France, and I would be in Paris, then it might be the other way around. So we'd be mailing each other the stuff. And we're talking pre-FedX, of course, so it took awhile.

SMOKE SIGNALS: And Alex (Trocchi) was on an accompanying barge writing Cain's Book?

SOUTHERN: (chuckles)Yes, we were barge 'Captains,' as they called themselves - rather eupemistically since it was a job so lowly that it was ordinarily held by guys who had been kicked out of the Longshore-man's Union - old winos and the like - being replaced now by this new breed, the dope head writer. But it was one of those classic writer's jobs, like hotel clerk, night watchman, fire-tower guy, etcetra, with practically no duties ("Just keep her tied up and pumped out"). Alex found it by chance, wandering around the West Side docks after a few hours at the White Horse Tavern. The guy who did the hiring happened to be Scottish - a Scotsman, called 'Scotty', in fact. So he took a fancy to Alex, Alex being a Ludgate Scholar from Glasgow, and boss-charm besides. (Scottish accent; "Have ye had any experience at sea, lad?" "Only with small craft, sir - punting on the Clyde and the like." "Good enough, lad, I like the cut of yer jib.") So Alex was in. And about half a dozen of us - of similar stamp and kidney - were quick to follow. . .under auspices of The Great Trok.

SOUTHERN: The ones we were on carried rocks. They were hauling huge boulders up to the sea wall they were building, a great ocean-jetty a few miles off shore. Hauling these rocks down from a quarry at the top of the Hudson, about a three-day trip. And you could take people along. It got to be a 'social must', going up river on the barge. Nelson Algren came a couple of times, David Solomon and Seymour Krim, Chris-topher Logue and Jimmy Baldwin. And, of course, Mason would come along quite often. I remember once, after a great hash rave-up, Jimmy just sort of collaposed over the side and Mason had to pull him back aboard, after extracting some sort of weird promise. In jest, of course. So life on the barge was not without interest.

SOUTHERN: Yes, when I came back from Paris, Alex was working on the barges. Before that I never knew that their was anyone on a barge. But there's a cabin with a bed and coal stove, and, of course, a deck about the size of a football field. It could accomodate a lot of stowaways, even when it was loaded with these gigantic boulders. Sometimes we would be staked out in the middle of the river, several barges tied together. So we could party. Any-way it was a good job for a writer in those days.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Maybe we should. Was this about the time Olympia released Candy?

SOUTHERN: Yes, and it was being smuggled through customs and circulated around New York. You could get it at the Gotham Book Mart. In fact, Mason and I brought in a few copies ourselves and sold them to her (Frances Stelloff). And there was this one guy, Peter Israel, an editor at Putnam, who was very perceptive about certain things, and he realized the book had some kind of interesting potential, so he was good enough not to ask us to "tone it down," as everyone suggested. Actually it turned out not to have many four-letter words anyway, so toning it down would have destroyed it. Then it just took off. It was on the bestseller list for about 11 months.

SOUTHERN: No, just before the six months royalty statement was due, Girodias made a deal with some fellow for a pirated edition. So the royalties were held up, indefinitely.

SOUTHERN: Yeah. It was one of those things where if a book in English is first published outside the U.S., you have to apply for something called an 'ad-interim copyright', which is good for six months, then has to be renewed - every six months until it's published here. Well, we knew nothing about this, but I guess Girodias did because a whole swarm of paperback publishers started putting it out, fly by night. One in particular--

SOUTHERN: Yeah, Maxwell Kenton. Girodias was forced into that once when he was ultra-hot with Customs. They had this list of books that were not allowed out of France or into the U.S., so to beat this rap, he changed the title. For a while it was called Lollipop.

SOUTHERN: Yeah. And the name of the author was Maxwell Kenton. A name I first used with David Burnett, of all people. He was the son of Martha Foley and Whit Burnett of The Best American Short Stories fame. We were collaborating on some short detective stuff, and even sold a couple to Argosy Magazine, and we used the pseudonym 'Maxwell Kenton'. So when Mason at one point had an attack of conscience and said, "Man, I've decided I don't want my mother to know about this book," we took the name Maxwell Kenton so his mother would be spared anguish at her Mah-Jong parties.

SMOKE SIGNALS: I have one issue Iris Owens gave me. Actually she was the one who turned me on to the whole Paris-Olympia scene. I'd already read you of course, but not Alex (Trocchi) - well that's not exactly true - I'd read Frances Lengel down at the dirty book store before I knew he was Trocchi. (laughter) Was it actually a real scene there? Or is that my romantic exaggeration?

SOUTHERN: Oh it was a terrific scene. Because the cafes were such great places to hang out, they were so open, you could smoke hash at the tables, if you were fairly discreet. There was the expatriot crowd, which was more or less comprised of interesting people, creatively inclined. So we would fall out there at one of the cafes, about four in the afternoon, sip Pernod until dinner, then afterwards go to a jazz club. Bird and Diz, and Miles and Bud Powell, and Monk were all there, and if not someone else. Lester Young and Don Byas. It was a period when The Village and St. Germain des Pres were sort of interchangeable, just going back and forth. The thing to do was take a freighter - it was the cheapest way to go. And it was a comfortable and interesting way to go because it was long - 13 days. And the Scandinavian ones had pretty good food. Relative to what we were used to. There were only about eight passengers. We'd eat at The Captain's Table - and he was invariably some kind of great lush. So he was always fun. And The Village was swinging then. Once in a while you'd find yourself homesick, for one place or the other, but it was okay, because both were good places to arrive at.

SOUTHERN: From about '48 to '52. It was also the bullfight era'. Sort of checking out Hemingway, beginning with San Sebastian, then going on to Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid and ending up in Seville. Mason and I did that a few times, and in 1950 or '51 we ran with the bulls in Pamplona. That was pretty weird. He talked me into that, like he did with joining the kibbutz that time. He was very persuasisve.

SOUTHERN: Yes, we would save up some money and just take off, 'On the Road' style. Sometimes we had a car, other times we took the train. It was always a gas.

SOUTHERN: (laughing) Well, he was a poet. A poet with a sense of humor. And I like I say, he was ultra persusive. Boss persuasion. Once he convinced me to join a kibbutz with him and go to Israel, despite my complete ignorance of anything Jewish. So we packed some books and clothes and checked into the Holland-American kibbutz freighter, into a dormitory type situation, with about 60 other guys. The ship was still at the dock, on 11th Avenue - not far from the old barge, as a matter of fact, and we had a couple of days to wait until they got their full roster. So we were put to work in the hole, cleaning the boilers - an unbelievable shitty job, plunging our arms up to the shoulder into these furnace pipes and bringing out mountains of wet black soot. Gross City. Anyway on the first morning when we woke up, one guy is already awake, breaking out over the fact that 30 dollars is missing from his footlocker. Someone else says "Okay, we've got to put locks on the footlockers." Someone else says "No, we've got to trust each other. Whoever took the money needed it." This doesn't go over to well with the guy who lost the 30 bucks. He's still ranting. So immediately this tight-knit and brotherly group is divided ito two bickering factions. Hardly the utopian comraderie we had expected. So we split. Went to the White Horse and had a couple of tall ones.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Alex wasn't doing junk in Paris? John Caulder told me Cocteau turned him on.

SOUTHERN: Yes, well he was doing a lot of things, a lot of opium, but there it was really recreational. Cerebal. Had a nice decadent, upper class tone to it. When it got back here they really got hooked into a bad scene. You'd have to be very wealthy indeed not to get involved in anti social behavior to support your habit. Alex putting his girl on the street. . . Did you meet Lyn?

SMOKE SIGNALS: Was this all happening at the same time Hollywood came calling for Candy?

SOUTHERN: No. Blue Movie was based on an idea that Stanley Kubrick had. Somebody came by one day with some porn footage. So we looked at it, and he said, "Wouldn't it be interesting if one day someone who was an artist would do that - using really beautiful actors and good equipment." So that was the genesis. Of course I was hoping he would do it as a film. But he's surprisingly puritanical and shy. When he read part of it, still in manuscript, he said, "Congratulations, you've written the definitive blow job." There actually was a tremendous amount of interest in doing Blue Movie. It nearly happened a couple of times, and one of those times it was fantastic. Ringo Starr had the option - he had it for a couple of years. And John Cally, who was a very hip Producer at MGM - he produced The Loved One that I worked on, and he became the President of Warner Brothers for a brief time, so he was in this heavy decision-making position, and said, "Well now it's time to do Blue Movie." He was convinced that the first studio to come out with a quality full length film showing erection and penetration, using stars, would go over the top. "It'll be like Gone With The Wind," he kept saying. Super enthusiastic about it. So he got Mike Nichols to direct. And since John was practically living with Julie Andrews at the time, he was able to get her of all people, as the girl. John's diabolical genius envisioned Mary Poppins getting banged for the world. And so Mike Nichols was ready to go - ready to do it - I couldn't believe it - so John called Nichols, put me on the other phone and said, "Terry Southern's here now, and he's worried you're not going to do erection and penetration." It could actually be cut in, or simulated, but it had to look like it - you know, like a pan instead of a cut. So he said, "yes." And they reassured me on the phone. So I went to see Ringo, and I said, "Look, there's this chance to do this." He said, "Right, right, right. . .just make sure you've got a proper deal." I think they might try to use Buck Henry on the script. But the whole thing got bogged down in lawyers. It turned out that Mike Nichols has something like a superstition about allowing other people to be cut into his projects. And the deal fell through, in a grotesque hangup between Nichols and Ringo's lawyers. But if it had been done, with those kind of credentuals, between Nichols and Julie Andrews, they could hardly have dismissed it as shabby porn.

SMOKE SIGNALS: That's tough to top, but what was the real story of Easy Rider? Did Dennis Hopper actually write it?

SOUTHERN: (laughs) If Den Hopper improvises a dozen lines and six of them survive the cutting room floor he'll put in for screenplay credit. That's the name of the game of a certain Den Hopper. No, it would be almost impossible to exaggerate his contribution to the film - but, by George, he manages to do it every time. The precise way it came down was that Dennis and Peter (Fonda) came to me with an idea. Peter was under contract to A.I.P. for several motorcycle movies, and he still owed them one. Dennis persuaded him to let him (Dennis) direct the next one, and, under the guise of making an ordinary A.I.P. potboiler they would make something interesting and worthwhile - which I would write. So they came to my place on 36th street in New York, with an idea for a story - a sort of hippy / dope / caper. Peter was to be the actor / producer, Dennis the actor / director, and a certain yours truly, the writer. I was able to put them up there - in a room, incidentally, later immortalized by the sojourn of Dr. W. S. Benway (Burroughs). So we began smoking dope in earnest and having a non-stop story-conference. The initial idea had to do with a couple of young guys who are fed up with the system, want to make one big score, and split. Use the money to buy a boat in Key West and sail into the sunset was the general notion, and indeed was already slated to be the film's final poetic sequence. We would occasionally dictate to an elderly woman typist who firmly believed in the arrival, and presence everywhere of the inhabitants of Venus, so she would talk about this. Finally I started taping her and then had her rap about it transcribed, how they were everywhere - Jack Nicholson's thing was based on that So you can see that during these conferences the hippy/dope/caper premise went through quite a few changes. The first notion was that they not be bikers but a duo of daredevil car drivers barnstorming around the U.S. being exploited by a series of unscrupulous promoters until they were finally disgusted enough to quit. Then one day the dope smoke cleared long enough to remember that Peter's commitment was for a motorcycle flic, and we switched over pronto. It wasn't until the end that it took on a genuinely artistic dimension - when it suddenly evolved into an indictment of the American redneck, and his hatred and intolerance for anything that is remotely different from himself - somewhat to the surprise of Den Hopper (imitates Hopper in Apocalypse Now): "You mean kill 'em both? Hey, man, are you outta your gourd?!?" I think for a minute he was still hoping they would somehow beat the system. Sail into the sunset with a lot of loot and freedom. But of course, he was hip enough to realize, a minute later, that it (their death) was more or less mandatory.

SOUTHERN: No, no, I'm saying that the improvisation was always within the framework of the obligations of the scene - a scene which already existed.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Then how did Dennis and Peter get included in the screenplay credits?

SOUTHERN: After they had seen a couple of screenings of it on the coast, I got a call from Peter. He said that he and Dennis liked the film so much they wanted to be in on the screenplay credits. Well, one of them was the producer and other was the director so there was no way the Writer's Guild was going to allow them to take a screenplay credit unless I insisted. And even then they said there was supposed to be a 'compulsory arbitration' because too often producers and directors will muscle themselves into a screenplay credit through some under-the-table deal with the writer. They (the WGA) said I would be crazy to allow it and wanted to be assured I wasn't being coerced or bribed in any way. Because they hate the idea of these 'hyphenates' - you know, writer-producer, director-producer. . .because of that history of muscle I mentioned. Anyway, we were great friends at the time, so I went along with it without much thought. So I actually did it out of a sense of comraderi, said that they could use it, and would help them out. So I just went along with it. (Hopper's) always been extremely insecure, and I gave him credit because I wanted to pull him out. In Interview he pretty much claimed credit for the whole script. I called him, and I called the woman who interviewed him. He said he didn't remember saying it. Then I heard he said it somewhere else.

SOUTHERN: Yes. Except we still have persuasion. Which can be considerable sometimes. Which Tony Richardson was great about. Suggestions. . .Of course Stanley(Kubrick), Stanley was like Chaplin. . .He always tried to compose his own music - he'd get Public Domain stuff, existing stuff, he'd hardly ever use a composer, 'cause he liked it to read a film by Stanley Kubrick. But of course, he deserves that.

SOUTHERN: Working with Stanley was terrific. It was ideal, although the circum-stances may seem peculiar - in the back seat of a big car. The film was being shot at Shepperton, outside London, in the winter. So he would pick me up at 4:30 in the morning and we would make this hour-long trip to the studio. It was a big Bentley or a Rolls, so the passenger part was something like a railway compartment, with folding-out writing desks and good lighting. It would be pitch black outside and really cold, and we would be in this cozy-rosey compartment, in a creative groove, working on the scene to be shot that day.

SOUTHERN: Well, let's say trying to improve it. Kubrick would say "Now what's the most outrageous thing this guy (a character in the scene) would say at this point?" and hopefully I could come up with something like "If you try any preversion in there, I'll blow your head off."

SOUTHERN: Yes. Col. 'Bat' Guano ("if, indeed, that is your name") to Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. The thing about Kubrick is that he's not only extraordinarily creative, but he will encourage the other person to go all out, and not try to keep a 'reasonable lid' on it. Stanley's like a kind of chess playing poet. One side of his brain is very scientific, the other very poetic.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Over the years I heard talk of a 'missing scene' or a sequence that was deleted from Strangelove. What's the story on that?

SOUTHERN: Well that would be the fabulous so-called pie-fight episode. You may recall the scene near the end of the film, in the War Room, after the bomb has been dropped, and Strangelove suddenly stands up from his wheelchair, and says, Mine Fuehrer, I can valk!" And he takes a step? Recall that?

SOUTHERN: Well, in the missing sequence, after taking one step he falls flat on his face and starts trying to get back in his wheelchair, but each time it scoots out of his grasp. Meanwhile, parallel to this action in another part of the War Room, the Russian Ambassador is caught again trying to take pictures of the "Big Board', George C. Scott nails him and again they're fighting in the War Room.' So Scott exposes about 18 micro-mini spy cameras on the Ambassador - in his wrist-watch, cuff-links, tie-pin, on his ring-finger, everywhere. But Scott says, "I think these are dummy cameras. I think he's got the real McCoy concealed on his person." And he turns to the detail of MP's who have come in. "I want you to search him very carefully, boys," he says, "and don't overlook any of the six bodily orifices." And the Russian Ambassador goes through this quick calculation, "vun. . .two. . ." and then when he reaches the last one, he freaks. "Vhy you Capitalist swine," he says, and he reaches out of the frame, gets something and throws it at George C. Scott. I should mention that we have previously established a huge catering table that was wheeled in, laden with food, so they don't have to leave the War Room during this crisis. So the Ambassador reaches out of the frame, grabs something from the table and throws it at Scott. We don't see what it is immediately but Scott ducks, and this big custard pie hits the President in the face. The mere indignity of this is so monstrous that the President just faints dead away. Scott grabs him and keeps him from falling, and he's holding him in his arms like a martyred hero, "Gentlemen," he says to the others, "Our President has been struck down in the prime of his life. . .by a custard pie. I say 'Massive Retaliation!" And he throws something at the Ambassador. And it misses and hits one of the other Joint Chiefs. So this immense pie-fight begins - between Army, Navy, Air Force - a bit of inter-service rivalry, if you grasp the innuendo. Now while this pie-fight is going on, Strangelove is still trying to get back into this wheelchair, moving like a snake across the floor of the War Room, and the chair continuing to scoot out of his grasp each time he reaches for it. Finally he gets to the end of the War Room, and the chair is against the wall and it looks like he's got it this time. But it scoots away again. So Strangelove pulls himself up so that he's sitting with his back against the wall. And he's watching the pie-fight in the distance. Then his hand - his uncontrollable right hand - reaches inside his coat and comes out with a Luger pistol and points it at his head. He grabs his wrist with his other hand and grapples for the pistol, which goes off with a tremendous roar. Then cut to the long shot of all these generals in a freeze frame. And Strangelove says, "Enough of these childish games. We have work to do." So they all stand there staring at him in complete silence, until Scott recognizes this is the guy to get tight with, so he walks all the way across the War Room floor, and says, "Doctor, may I help you?" And helps him into his wheelchair. He starts pushing him back across the floor, which by now is so deep in custard pies it resembles a beach - and sure enough we quickly pass the President and the Russian ambassador sitting there crosslegged like two children, doing sand castles, making mountains. And Strange-love says, "Ah too bad. Apparently their minds have snapped under the strain. Perhaps they'll have to be institution-alized." And so Scott continues pushing him across to this group of officers and CIA types, who are so covered they look like ghosts. And he says, "Well, boys, I think the future of this great nation of ours is in the hands of people like Doc Strangelove, and I think we owe him a vote of thanks. Let's hear it for the good Doctor." And in a really eerie (whispering) voice, they go, "hip-hip hooray, hip-hip hooray." And then he continues pushing him across the floor as they start singing, "For he's a jolly good fellow, for he's a jolly good fellow." So this counter camera pulls up so you've got this long shot of the ultimate allegiance between this mad scientist and this general from The Joint Chief of Staff. And then they cut to the explosion and the song "We'll Meet Again," comes in - and the credits rise.

SOUTHERN: Not without good reason. The problem was that Stanley, great genius director that he is, forgot to say, "Listen, what we're representing here is interservice rivalry." Which is one of the most evil things - each time there's an appropriation to one group the other says, "listen, we've got to have that too." And there's no stopping the Pentagon on this level. It's viscous. And he forgot to tell them it's viscous. So what's happening in this pie fight is that people are laughing, and they shouldn't be laugh-ing. It's supposed to be deadly serious. And it was such a funny situation, that people outside the periphery, including Stanley and myself, were tossing pies into the melee, you see. And so it lost its edge. It was like a comedy scene, when everything else in the film had been played straight, except once when the Coca-Cola machine spurted in Keenan Wynn's face. So that's why he decided not to have it in. I saw it again recently, and think it holds up well.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Me too. So does The Loved One. It recently came out for the first time on video, after all these years. Why did it take so long?

SOUTHERN: For some weird reason, they held it back - it's an MGM film - Haskell Wexler, who was the coproducer and cinemaphotographer, had a copy he sent me, and I got a duplicate made, but you couldn't get it. The casting on that was great. Re-member that sequence with Milton Berle and Margarite Leighton when the dog dies and she doesn't want to let them bury the dog?

SMOKE SIGNALS: Yeah. that was played really strong. But Rod Steiger - Joyboy and his mother was too outrageous to describe.

SOUTHERN: Everytime I see Rod Steiger, rather, the few times I've seen him, he always talks about that. He was carried away by that role, he got into that role so much. . .He had his hair in rollers on the set. Running around on the set when he should have been resting, dishing with the girls. It had such a great cast: John Gielgud, Lionel Stander, Robert Morley, Jonathan Winters, Robert Morse. . .

SMOKE SIGNALS: You wrote the scripts for The Cincinnati Kid, Barberella, The End of The Road and The Magic Christian, right. What happened to The Magic Christian? I loved the book, the book has a whole life outside itself - was Guy Grand based on anybody in particular?

SOUTHERN: Well it's sort of a composite of people I've known or imagined. For some reason I've always thought of the actor Robert Morley, as the physical type. He has a nice absurdly pompous look about him.

SOUTHERN: Well, I had written a really good script of The Magic Christian for Peter Sellers, then he and the director, Joe McGrath, were in London, supposedly setting up the film while I finished working on an adaptation of John Barth's End Of The Road - which incidentally, was one of the most interesting films I've been involved with. But instead of waiting for me to get to London, Peter who was always ultra-hypper and antsy about everything, gets Spike Milligan and a couple of his Goon Show cronies to rewrite a few scenes - without having ever read the book. Dig that for gross weird. All they knew was that it was about an eccentric billionaire who staged elaborate practical jokes. So they slipped into a bit of infantile self-indulgence, with some pointlessly des-tructive behavior by Guy Grand. Totally out of character. They had him cutting up Rembrants for Chistsake! So I'm afraid that film has, in my view, some serious lapses.

SMOKE SIGNALS: The book had an incredible following - I met a number of drug dealers over the years who kept it locked up along with their personal stash.

SOUTHERN: The ultimate compliment? Peter Sellers, despite what happened to the film, bought a hundred copies when it first came out in England. He would give them to friends at Christmas. In fact, he was the one who turned Stanley (Kubrick) on to. . .this unique brand of humor.

SMOKE SIGNALS: You seem to have been able to go back and forth between films and prose easier than most writers. When you started writing films, was it hard to write prose?

SMOKE SIGNALS: Do you find a physical difference between writing prose and writing screenplays.

SOUTHERN: Well, there's quite a differ-ence in the deadline aspect of it. I've always sort of visualized things when I wrote prose, so that part comes easy to me. In fact easier than prose, because what I really like to write is dialogue.

SMOKE SIGNALS: I heard Paddy Chayefsky once said, "Terry Southern writes the best dialogue in America."

TERRY SOUTHERN: He wrote that in a letter to Peter Beard. He was the best around, so coming from him that means quite a bit.

SMOKE SIGNALS: The first dialogue that ever totally blew me away was from Red Dirt Marijuana and Razor Fight, the first two stories in the Red Dirt collection. In fact, back in 1970 or 71, I started adapting those stories for Richard Pryor.

SMOKE SIGNALS: I was going to come to you when the first draft was finished. C.K. was the perfect vehicle for Pryor to become a movie star. But before we could see if it was going to work as a screenplay, or get in touch with you to option it, Lady Sings The Blues hit, and WANGO, he became a movie star, and unfortunately the money came rolling over him and that was the end of any chance he had to do film work that was on the same level as his standup.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Was A Texas Summer based on Red Dirt Marijuana and Razor Fight?

SOUTHERN: Not exactly. The first two stories in Red Dirt Marijuana are excerpts from A Texas Summer. It just took me another 20 years to finish it as a novel.

SMOKE SIGNALS: Were you the white kid, Hal? Is it based on you growing up in Texas?

SOUTHERN: Reading it over, it seems to be based quite a bit on that. Not consciously, but I certainly drew on my childhood experiences. It's about one summer in the life of an impressionable 13-year-old farmboy, and especially his relationship with a 35-year-old black, who's the hired hand. And he - the black guy - is relatively hip and laid back, with a terrific sense of humor - he was, you know, one of those classic 'great-spades-of-Texas' types; works hard, drinks sweet Lucy, smokes a little dope, fabulous story teller, great ball player, great crap shooter, eats bar-b-que so hot it makes your eyes water, gets into the occasional razor fight, the whole store. Well, I knew a guy like that. Fantastic guy. A tremendous influence on every white kid he came across. Real down home guru, without realizing it, of course.

SOUTHERN: Well Texas is probably a good place for a boy to grow up, in a Huck Finn sort of way, like one big outdoor playground, with a lot of hunting and fishing Dad-and-Lad stuff going on. But, as Liz Taylor said, "It's hell on horses and women." Because it's a cultural desert. But once, when I was seven or eight and sick in in bed, my mother decided to read to me. The book she chose, for some odd reason, since her own leaning was more towards Louis Bromfield, was a volume of the great E. A. Poe - The Gold Bug, if memory serves. Well, for a young Texas lout, E. A. Poe was heady brew. And it was a perfect turn-on to "Quality-lit," of a weirdo bent. I was hooked on Poe. And Poe, of course, is the gateway to the greatest. If marijuana leads to cocaine, Poe most certainly leads to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Joyce, Celine, Lautreamont, Huysmans, Nathaniel West, Faulkner, Sartre, etcetra, etcetra, ad glorium.

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EAT YOUR ART OUT

Dear Mike Art:

I've thought long and hard about the diet questions you posed to me in that hotel lobby in Bagdad by the bay. The thing that both of us perhaps are up against is it is in the nature of a pig to be piggish. A pig acts piggy, it's his nature. Fortunately, the only way to not be pulpy or burly is to change into another kind of animal in some kind of desperately, gloomy shamanistic ritual. Now since that's a little improbable but not impossible, mind you, there are other measure that can be taken to keep this piggishness in check. Over the years I've lost close to 3,700 pounds. In fact, I've lost 20 times my body weight. I virtually, for all intents and purposes, disappeared 20 times. Few, few indeed can equal this record. I'm a version of Mandrake the Magician, although without a Nardo at this point. I long for a Nardo to help me out with this whole project. So I don't know what to tell you, Mike. Either change into some other kind of animal or maybe work a little bit harder at it. Just eat blue meat. Vomit a lot, take Ex-lax, drink yourself silly. Get the dry heaves, drink flu bacteria, drink viruses, raid hospitals, eat tumors for all I know. Just gobble up test tube experiments at Army installations. Become sick, rub yourself with these diseases. You'll get small, you'll get small, my son.

P.S. Just think of your own name ART - you ought to have enough fucking ingenuity not to be a lard ass. Ok, now here's the other thing: there are dangers at any moment in life we're virtually a split second from hell, from being hurled into the universe - that's what we call mortadella. There are different kinds of dangers: sexual dangers in becoming thinner and attractive ( I find now I'm almost beautiful and women paw at my feet like hungry puppies). This is a problem as it can cause expensive divorces or interfere with our work, nap schedule and eating.

Jim Harrison

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GREAT MOMENTS IN SPORTZ: THE WOMEN'S LIB TAKEOVER OF GROVE PRESS - "The FBI was responsible. I knew it was them. It was totally bizarre. I tried to nail it down. It went on for months. They destroyed us. It's hard to explain it to people on the outside, but that takeover really was the end of Grove Press. We had like 300 and something employees when it started and we had like 20 when it was finished."

By the time he was in the 8th grade Barney Rosset was permanently radicalized, a romantic and privileged outlaw who would change the face of the American culture by standing up against censorship, and breaking down the barriers to true freedom of speech. The only child of a Chicago banker, he was investigated by his arch enemy, the FBI, before he was 13 years old. The first FBI report on him noted, "The subject is lefthanded," a fitting title for an autobiography, if he ever decides to write one.

Originally a filmmaker after he got out of the Army, Rosset fell into publishing accidentally, partly out of the frustration of being a filmmaker and partly because Grove Press landed in his lap. Over the next 35 years he rattled the smug, conservative hallowed halls of publishing, waving his banner of SEX & POLITICS wherever he went, breaking the rules as he came across them, standing up for what he believed in, in one court battle after another, as he published what must be considered along with Maurice Girodias' list at Olympia Press in Paris, the most ground breaking group of writers any English speaking publisher has put together over the last half of the 20th century. From Miller to Burroughs, to Robbe-Grillet, the list reads like a who's who of the avant-garde, in literature, film, theatre and politics.

At its height, from the mid 60's to the early 70's, Grove owned its own building in Greenwhich Village, published the most important radical magazine in America, Evergreen Review, owned its own theatre, and made a fortune showing and distributing the erotic film I Am Curious (Yellow). As the literary flagship of the counterculture, Grove indirectly helped create an entire generation out to the change the world, but inevitably got caught up and brought down by the changes they promoted themselves. A Women's Liberation takeover of the Grove Press building that lasted for months put Grove behind a financial 8-ball they could never get off their back. It took 12 years of treading to pay off the debts incurred in that period, so in 1985 when he was offered $2 million by Lord Weidenfeld, and the guarantee he could continue to run his company with the financial clout to compete in the spiraling marketplace, Rosset accepted the offer. Just over a year later George Weidenfeld unceremoniously removed him as chief operating officer of his company.

Fiercely passionate and loyal, sometimes even to his enemies, with a jutting jaw and snow white hair, Rosset has the energy of a man 30 years younger. For the last several years he has been publishing his own list of erotic/political books under the banner of Blue Moon Books. Here now is his first hand account of the takeover and destruction of Grove Press.

"The FBI was responsible. I knew it was them. It was totally bizarre. I tried to nail it down. It went on for months. They destroyed us. It's hard to explain it to people on the outside, but that takeover really was the end of Grove Press. We had like 300 and something employees when it started and we had like 20 when it was finished. We won the battle, if you want to call that winning. And it was aided and abetted terribly and unfortunately by a left wing union. It was the Amalgamated Furriers. They were attempting to unionize Grove Press. Now no publishing company was unionized. Why did they start with us? Number one: The head of the union confessed to me he was an opportunist, and that he felt I was correct, it was an FBI instigated thing, and that he fell for it. The union was having a lot of trouble. The Furriers - it was a dying union. A left wing union that had been red baited almost out of existence during the McCarthy era. It had in its Constitution that you could not be a member of the union if you believed in violence or overthrowing the government. That was in their Constitution and it was forced on them by the McCarthy people. Otherwise it would have been destroyed. Well that wasn't our fault. But there they were attacking us. So we counter attacked -- Do you want to be a member of a fucking union you can't even be a Black Panther? We didn't even say that, we just handed out the Constitution to everybody that worked at Grove. And when they had meetings of the union at Grove I would go. I'd speak because there was a certain amount of Democratic pluralism there. I'd get up and say I'm firing all of you whether you win or lose. I couldn't find out from these idiots what they wanted. They would never tell me. I never got a demand.

"There were two groups. There was a Women's Lib group who did not work there. Well, two of them worked in the building. And there were 12 or 15 of them. They were let in. And I was in Europe. And I called Grove from Denmark, and I got my secretary and I said, 'Hi, how's everything?' And she says, 'Fine.' 'Everything going ok?' I ask. 'Well there is something special today; I'm on the 6th floor.' Our office was on the 7th floor. 'Well why?' said I. 'Well,' she says, 'some other people are in your office.' 'WHAT?' (laughter) In my office I had all my personal letters and records. And they had barricaded themselves into my office.

"I said, 'Get 'em out!' And she said, 'No, they won't come out.' I said, 'Go in and throw them out.' 'No, nobody wants to do that.' I'll tell you what I would've done, I would've done what I'm telling you. So I said, 'Let me speak to somebody else.' So I spoke to Dick Seaver and a guy named Ira Shapiro. And nobody really wanted to get them out. I mean I'm going crazy. What are they doing while they're in there? They did smash up the furniture but they didn't steal the documents, which is utterly amazing! But they sure smashed the place up, and hung flags out the window like they'd taken over Grove Press. And here I am sitting in Denmark -- rather cleverly planned, wouldn't you say? Well, I said, 'If none of you have enough guts to get them out, call the police.' So they called the police. But the girls inside the office, the ones barricaded inside, said, No, they only wanted to be arrested by women cops. So they went out and looked for women cops, but they couldn't find any. So finally the men cops had go in and carry them out. Our own little Civil Rights movement. So they carried them out, and they were booked and arrested and so on. My lawyer, a woman I had hired, on the staff of Grove Press, because I wanted to be in the forefront of using legal aid for women, was their lawyer it turned out. So I come back from Denmark, and they're arrested, and this is the beginning of the drive to unionize Grove. And people are marching around the building screaming, You make all your money on obscenity, and give all this money to black women of America, and give it to Malcolm X's widow -- Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow was a very very great friend, and happy what we were doing for her. The letters they wrote were phony. They were like what happened with the Black Panthers. Bobby Seal would write a letter to one of the others, but it wouldn't be his letter -- a fake letter, and then the other guy would get mad, and the next thing you knew they were shooting each other. Fake letter. This was the same thing. There were all sorts of fake documents handed out. I have 'em. Accusing me. The lives of women were being destroyed by pornographers. So they demanded a 24 hour a day child care center. I said, 'Ok. There's an empty lot across the street owned by NYU. It has a fence around it. I will lead you there. And we will put up a tent. Nobody would follow me. Then we had speeches all day in front of the building. One guy worked at Random House. I finally called up Bernstein(President of Random House),who I didn't know, and said, 'If that guy doesn't quit making fucking speeches in front of this building I personally am going to come down and take over Random House. By force. He said, 'What? What? What?' and he called in his editor John Simon and read the riot act to him. He stopped immediately. Unbelievable! He was also Abbie Hoffman's editor. And later they had a book of Abbie's called Steal This Book, and they wouldn't publish it, and we did it. So I mean it was monstrous -- every day the building was emptied out by bomb threats. By fire alarms. I mean it was a living hell. And this fucking union was doing all of this and thinking they were going to organize and get some points out of it. Well, it went on and on, and we didn't know who could vote -- no managing people could vote, this that and the other. And it went on two or three months and they finally had the election and they were wiped out! I mean, nobody voted for them. I thought we were all lost -- I'd already written my speech accepting the union: It was a good fight and we lost -- welcome. And when I went to the union meetings the head of the union, this crazy nut, would get up and say, 'Well I think Barney is wrong, but I admire him.' And then our side had a meeting, rather parties at The Village Gate -- I wouldn't let him in. He asked me why he couldn't get in, and I said, 'because I don't want you.' And he said, 'but I let you in our meetings.' And I said, 'Well, you're stupid!' (laughs) But I'd sit outside at the bar with him, talking while the party was going on inside. He'd call me on the phone and say, 'Barney, you and I ought to have a drink and play a game of tennis.' I said, 'Listen, we're in a fight. When this is over we'll have a drink and play tennis.' But when it was over and we won, I asked the sonofabitch to have a drink with me and play a game of tennis, but he wouldn't do it! But about a year later he did come around to my point of view, and we sat down with lawyers and tried to figure out who the fuck literally were the people who instigated this thing, and we could never ever finger point it. And they destroyed us!

"When we went to the trial of these women who were arrested, Charles Rembar always said it was his finest hour as a lawyer. Here were these women who wanted to go to jail, they were bound and determined to destroy the courthouse, and we go before the Judge and this woman Emily Goodman is the lawyer for them, and she demands they give back the women's fingerprints. She tells the Judge, 'You've illegally taken our fingerprints, and we demand them back! And we want a 24 hour child care center in courtroom right now.' And they had a couple of babies with them. Robin Morgan, who worked at Grove; her baby was yelling and screaming. While all this was going on I talked to the arresting officer and asked him whether it would influence him in making future arrests if we dropped the charges. He said it wouldn't, but the DA said it would be a terrible tragedy. So he asked the policeman, who told him it wouldn't have any effect on him performing his duties in the future if the charges were dropped. And Emily Goodman was screaming at the Judge and Robin Morgan's baby was screaming at the Judge, so the Judge looked around the crowded courtroom, and said, 'I agree with Mr. Rembar,' and dismissed the case. I never heard from any of those women again.

"It really crippled the company. We were dead broke after that. We had to move back to 11th street -- we had a building, the Evergreen Theatre. And from there we moved in my house, where I lived. And from then on it was a holding operation. For a number of years we were actually making a little bit of money, but we had incurred debts we couldn't pay - it took 12 years to pay them off, month to month. We finally did it, but the company was just subsisting for all those years. So when this guy Weidenfeld came along and said, "Oh I've got this woman who's got all the money in the world and she's gonna give it all to me, and I want you. You can do whatever you want. I'll give you all this money to run the company." I was sucked in. And then thrown out. Weidenfeld was a master con man. I shouldn't have been surprised. He has a great talent for taking you in and making you feel immune. He told me exactly what he was going to do to everyone and then he did it to me. And that in a nutshell was that."