C&C 49: Paper Anniversary

One year of Cocktails and Crime and some of its real-world benefits

It nearly slipped my notice over the long July 4^th weekend that I launched this newsletter on July 5, 2023. Please note that this is not yet the fiftieth edition, which means I have managed to almost but not quite publish on a weekly basis. That pace seems about right.

The Substack experience has been reminiscent of old-school blogging. Running a blog in those halcyon days—I actually did manage to miss the twentieth anniversary of my website’s launch, in April of this year—resulted in unexpected opportunities and connections, and that same phenomenon is playing out here. For instance, the post about my attempt to tell the true-crime story recounted in the Netflix documentary How to Rob a Bank came to the attention of one of the film’s directors. He got in touch, and we had a terrific conversation about our shared fascination with Scott Scurlock, aka the Hollywood Bandit, that caught me up on what happened to some of the people connected to Scurlock whom I encountered over twenty years ago. I appreciated that contact immensely.

I’m also occasionally taking the initiative myself. After I published a rant about Major League Baseball—which was actually about late-stage capitalism and which proved surprisingly popular, so don’t encourage me—Substack steered me toward Good Eye, Noah Gittell’s newsletter about movies, baseball, and baseball movies. How could I not love it, especially after discovering that he’s also a New York Mets fan who counts Zero Effect among his favorite films? Gittell’s Baseball: The Movie (2024) was about to be published, and he was marking the occasion with a countdown of the fifty greatest baseball films, a thorough list that finds room for Rhubarb (1951), a silly but fun Ray Milland film about a cat that inherits a ballclub, and one of Joe E. Brown’s comedies from the 1930s. Personally, I’d have bumped his #2 choice, Bull Durham (1988), ahead of A League of Their Own (1992), but then I’m a hardcore Ron Shelton fan. Upon the book’s release, Gittell chronicled his rambling tour, which involved pilgrimages to various ballparks and book signings that often included film screenings. I grumbled, assuming my usual fate of missing out. (Seattle, despite its size, is far enough out of the way that too many artists tend to bypass it. It’s doubly annoying when writers and performers I want to see appear in Portland then Vancouver, BC with no stops in between. Blame Seattle’s lack of mid-sized concert venues and the loss of several bookstores.) Then I checked his itinerary. The last time I’d visited the Barnes & Noble where he’d scheduled a Saturday afternoon signing, Rosemarie and I were promoting the second Renee Patrick novel Dangerous to Know (2017)—and we’d skipped a rare Mets/Mariners game to do so. Substack and the baseball gods clearly wanted me there.

Of course Gittell and I talked about the team, then in the midst of the remarkable June run that put them back in the playoff conversation, and movies. I offered a defense of Ron Shelton’s Cobb (1994), which we agreed was several years too early in telling the unvarnished truth about a baseball legend. I even introduced him to a movie with a Seattle angle that had escaped his attention, the justly-forgotten made-for-cable The Comrades of Summer (1992). Written by the Oscar-nominated scribe of Saving Private Ryan (1998), it’s about a recently-fired Mariners skipper (Joe Mantegna) signing on to manage the Russian Olympic team. Naturally, I bought a copy of Baseball: The Movie, which the author signed as only a fellow Mets fan would.

The book considers how baseball films tell the story not only of the national pastime’s fortunes but of America itself. Gittell reaches back to the earliest days of Hollywood as well as dedicating space to underseen films like the Negro Leagues barnstorming comedy The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976) and Sugar (2008), an indie drama about a young Dominican pitching prospect made by the filmmaking duo of Anna Fleck and Ryan Boden between the Oscar-nominated Half Nelson (2006) and Captain Marvel (2019). He justifiably slams The Sandlot (1993), a movie MLB routinely celebrates, because it “erases segregation in baseball from its world” and because it’s generally not very good. I’ll go Gittell one better: The Sandlot is a terrible movie, a schmaltzy nostalgia fest featuring perhaps the worst voiceover—badly written, badly delivered—in the history of the medium, inferior even to Harrison Ford’s “I’m trying to ruin this on purpose” narration of Blade Runner (1982). Some of the book’s best bits are in the sidebars, like an inquiry into which team is the most popular in baseball cinema with Gittell setting aside any homer tendencies to make a strong case for the Metropolitans—partly because the franchise, from the very beginning, has always been cheap—and an interview with Richard Linklater, “the preeminent baseball filmmaker of all time, even if he doesn’t think of himself that way.” For fans of the game and the movies, it’s a treat, and a book I likely wouldn’t have heard about were it not for Substack.

RIP Robert Towne

The screenwriter/director passed away at age 89 on July 1. His Academy Award-winning script for Chinatown (1974) has been hailed as the greatest ever written. As the film celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, it only seems more prescient, attuned to our current moment with its battles over natural resources, its blurring of public and private crimes, its underlying belief that the purpose of all our vaunted systems is to protect the rich at all costs.

Let me put in a word for Towne’s other Los Angeles crime drama. Tequila Sunrise (1988) came out at exactly the right time for me, opening the door to film noir. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the film helped make me who I am. I wrote a piece for Noir City magazine in 2016 about the movie and the effect it had on me. I’m glad I had the chance to do so.

What I’m Watching

The Bikeriders (2024). Jeff Nichols’s adaptation of the 1968 collection of photographs by Danny Lyon makes for an unlikely hangout movie. I’d have spent another two hours in the company of these glorious misfits. Jodie Comer’s Chicago accent is terrific, as is her performance as a woman familiar from my childhood, always sitting on her stoop with a beer and a cigarette, happy to chat with any passerby. The movie’s potent vibe is rooted in a bygone here and now, when no one had thoughts of going viral or influencing anyone, when making your place in the world meant finding your people and spending time with them.

So Fine (1981). The directorial debut of Andrew Bergman is now on The Criterion Channel. I described the plot to Rosemarie as I recalled it from the above trailer, and she essentially said, “There’s no way that’s a real movie.” I assure you, it is. Parts of it have dated badly, other parts remain uproarious, and all of the latter feature Jack Warden, one of those character actors who elevated everything he was in. You’ve gotta love that it’s part of Criterion’s Times Square series when there’s basically one shot of Times Square in the film. Someone at Criterion is clearly a fan of Bergman, who wrote another of the greatest scripts of all time with The In-Laws (1979). Also recommended: his trio of novels about private eye Jack LeVine, rubbing shoulders with boldfaced names of the 1940s. They were a big influence on the Renee Patrick books.

What I’m Drinking

The Pacific Northwest dodged the hot weather for a while, but those days are over. Helping me beat the heat, courtesy of Imbibe magazine, is The Last Spritz. Danny Webber of the Capri Club in Los Angeles had the brilliant idea of transforming The Last Word, the classic cocktail rediscovered by Murray Stenson, into a tall summer cooler. I’ve been calling this one out of the bullpen on a near-nightly basis.

The Last Spritz

• 1 oz. maraschino liqueur

• 1 oz. green chartreuse

• 1 oz. lime juice

• Soda water

Combine the first three ingredients over ice in a Collins glass. Top with soda water. Garnish with a cherry.

What I’m Reading

Nothing beats an interview that becomes a genuine conversation, as in this New Yorker exchange between Nicolas Cage and Susan Orlean, which Cage is already positing as the seed for Adaptation 2.