Day three of Nation Blog Writing Month. The terrian is strange, the weather, beastly. Last night we were forced to kill our Sherpa for food and warmth.
(I was going to attempt a Tenzing Norgay joke here, but it's early...)
Anyway, the usual madness continues, both here (you don't wanna know) and in the wider world (Democrats squabbling over Iraq, Erik Prince defending Blackwater...Maybe you don't wanna know about that, either.), and the planet still spins.
I do want to make note of the passing of the criminally underrated screenwriter Charles Griffith, who died last month at the age of 77. Griffith was a member of the Roger Corman stable who did not break into the Big Time, unlike your Coppolas and Scorseses or Griffith's fellow scribe Robert Towne. Based on his work, however, Griffith might have been the most talented of the bunch.
He wrote Little Shop Of Horrors, for crying out loud, and The Wild Angels, which means he wrote the deathless line "We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the man." When ironic hipsters use endless variations of that line--and trust me, they do--they're unkowingly paying tribute to this unsung genius.
His scripts were inventively plotted, stuffed full of oddball characters and often brilliant dialogue. Unfortunately, Corman usually filmed them indifferently, neuturing their natural gusto, keeping their brilliance buried. Griffith tarried in the Corman stable too long, and by the seventies and eighties, when he was turning out the likes of Smokey Bites The Dust, it was obvious he'd never escape.
So he never made The Godfather or Taxi Driver or wrote Chinatown. But he gave us Seymour Krelboin, Gravis Muschnick and a carnivorous plant, and I'll take that any day of the week.
