Los Angeles—1962 to 1964
Looking for Life in the City of Los Angeles
After arriving in Los Angeles, I attended the summer school session at UCLA as a prelude to becoming a full-time student in the film department there. I had decided that I wanted to go to UCLA and study motion picture production. My major for this would be Theatre Arts, but in order to qualify to attend UCLA in the regular session I first had to raise my grade point average. So the following fall I enrolled at Santa Monica City College.
In the meantime, I familiarized myself with the UCLA campus. Fortunately, I had found a small deluxe bachelor apartment in Westwood that had a kitchenette, which most bachelor apartments did not have.
My apartment was only a short walk to Westwood Village, an upscale college town business area with all kinds of shops, restaurants, and small eating places. At the Village Deli, I purchased some pastrami, lox, cream cheese, a loaf of freshly baked rye bread, and a jar of mustard to take back to my apartment.
During that first summer in Los Angeles, I finally got to meet a girl that I had corresponded with as a pen pal for several years, Shirley Chao. Shirley was originally from Macao but had been living and going to school in Hong Kong while we had been writing letters to each other regularly. Now she was in Los Angeles and studying at UCLA.
Shirley was only a couple of years older than I was, but she was far more mature. She was more shy than outgoing, more cute than pretty, but we got along with each other from the very beginning, probably because we already knew a lot about each other.
We were two lonely people, basically strangers and yet not strangers, who had both been cast adrift in a large, intimidating, and unfamiliar city. If anything, this brought us even closer together. We decided that we were going to get to know each other and Los Angeles at the same time.
We took to exploring and discovering Los Angeles by riding the buses of the metropolitan transit system. One of the first places we set out to explore was Chinatown.
Like a couple of tourists, we browsed through the shops of New Chinatown before wandering down to North Spring Street to Old Chinatown, where Shirley was delighted to find the grocery stores, book and record shops—where she bought me a record by the Hong Kong singer and movie star Grace Chang—and other shops that sold the Chinese food items she had missed having since leaving Hong Kong.
We also found the two local theaters that showed Chinese movies—unfortunately without English subtitles, so she had to translate and explain to me what was going on. In our pen pal days, Shirley had regularly sent me Hong Kong movie magazines, so I was already familiar with a lot of the Chinese actors.
Near Little Tokyo, we discovered the Linda Lea Theatre on Main Street where the films from the Japanese companies Toei and Nikkatsu were shown. I had always been interested in Japanese films, so we sought out the other theaters in Los Angeles that showed them: the Kokusai Theatre, showing mostly chambara films like the Zatoichi series and Raizo Ichikawa films, and the Toho La Brea, where we were able to see the new Akira Kurosawa films.
It was there that I first saw Yojimbo, Sanjuro, The Bad Sleep Well, High and Low, and the rerelease of the controversial Kurosawa epic The Idiot. They also showed the action-packed Lone Wolf and Cub series of films starring Tomisaburo Wakayama. Fortunately, these Japanese movies did have English subtitles.
Hollywood was still a fascinating place back in 1962 when Shirley and I first explored it together. Even though it was only an aging shadow of its former self, the area still had the look and feel of the grand place that it once had been. Like any tourist might do, we went to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where we put our hands and feet in the handprints and shoeprints of the stars that had be immortalized there in the concrete.
The great abundance of bookstores in Hollywood fascinated me. There was the large Pickwick Bookstore whose stock filled three packed floors. There were also numerous small used bookstores in the area, and we came across the Larry Edmunds Cinema Bookshop, which I had been to many years ago as a child, and Shirley bought me a copy of the slim, hardbound British edition of Sergei Eisenstein’s screenplay for his unfinished film Que Viva Mexico. Los Angeles was truly a book lover’s paradise.
Aside from Chinatown and Little Tokyo, there were parts of the city that immigrants from other lands had settled into and called their own, as was reflected in the shops and restaurants that predominated the area. There was a growing Korea Town and Thai Town, as well as already established Jewish, Greek, and Armenian neighborhoods. There were a couple of blocks on Olympic Boulevard where Hawaiian markets and eateries could be found.
If one wanted to explore various ethnic cuisines, one could find German, Greek, French, Czechoslovakian, Indian, Indonesian, Peruvian, Polish, and Yugoslavian restaurants, as well as numerous standard Italian, Chinese, and Mexican eateries dotting the city in great abundance.
Having spent most of my life in the smaller towns of rural areas in Hawaii and New Mexico, I found myself in awe of this marvelous city. Virtually anything that one could possibly need or want from anywhere in the world could be found somewhere within this vast place.
Once the fall term began at Santa Monica City College, Shirley and I began seeing less and less of each other. She had finished her postgraduate studies at UCLA and had managed to get a job. She had also decided that she wanted to stay in Los Angeles, so she was looking for someone to marry. Although we had been good, even intimate friends, marriage at this time was something not on my agenda, so I decided to quietly and discreetly bow out of her life.
It was at Santa Monica City College that my introduction to Hollywood and real-life Hollywood personalities began. The school itself was a junior college with a modern campus that mirrored the casual atmosphere of its beach city surroundings. It was not large enough to be intimidating, which was a good thing at this point in my college career.
The theater arts department there was an exceptionally good one, and I managed to learn a lot. The legendary actor James Dean had studied acting there a few years back, and many of the instructors still remembered him. In fact, the teaching staff included a man named Joseph Brown who acted professionally in movies and television under the name of Victor Millan. I recognized him immediately because he had also appeared along with James Dean in the cast of George Stevens’ epic motion picture Giant, in which he played the part of Angel Obregon, Sr., Sal Mineo’s father, in the film.
Joe Brown also had a supporting part in Orson Welles’ great classic noir film Touch of Evil, and he frequently would tell us some very interesting stories about that particular shoot and Welles’ somewhat unconventional method of directing.
Apparently, Welles had a tendency to ignore the script that all the actors had memorized and show up on the day of the shoot with pages and pages of new dialogue. The actors would have to quickly memorize these while Welles set up the shot.
To me, this was a very clever way of achieving spontaneity while infusing the scene with a tension that probably wouldn’t have been there if the actors had been familiar with their lines.
Aside from Joe Brown, my teachers in the theatre arts department included the chairman of the department, Gene Owens, who taught the writing class, and the set design and construction instructor Win Smith.
I wrote my first play in Mrs. Owens’ dramaturgy class. It was a melodramatic thing about a conflict brought about by the racial tensions in South Africa, a subject that I knew next to nothing about other than what I had read in the newspapers and Time Magazine.
But Mrs. Owens apparently liked the play that I had written so much that she had me read it in front of the class. It was a truly embarrassing moment for me. Fortunately, this play disappeared a long time ago, hopefully never to resurface again.
Since the school was located on the west side of town, not far from the exclusive areas of Brentwood and Bel Air, some of my fellow students and friends included the sons, daughters, and relatives of some famous movie stars and entertainment personalities that lived there. Nicky Charisse was the son of the beautiful actress Cyd Charisse and her crooner husband Tony Martin, Bob Linkletter was the television personality Art Linkletter’s son, and Gail Hirsch was the legendary comedian Ed Wynn’s grandniece and Keenan Wynn’s niece.
As a member of the theatre arts department, I got to meet all of these celebrities, and what truly amazed me is how ordinary and down-to-earth they all were. Cyd Charisse was shorter than I had thought she would be—her movie appearances in those musicals made her look so tall—and Tony Martin turned out to be a really nice guy.
Ed Wynn proved to be a real cut-up and his son Keenan, who had been one of my dad’s favorite actors, certainly didn’t appear to be the drunk that the tabloids made him out to be.
At Santa Monica City College, I got to know quite a few people. Among them was Bob Klein, who later became a published writer of some renown and a college professor, as well as the co-owner with Larry Myers of the venerable Sam Johnson’s Bookshop on Venice Boulevard. But my best friend at Santa Monica City College was a happy-go-lucky guy named Eirik Knutzen.
On the first day of school, Eirik saw me walking around the campus dressed in my standard college garb—an old sports coat, blue jeans, and flip-flops—and when I offered to share my lunch with him—a large foot-long Italian submarine sandwich and a small wicker-wrapped bottle of chianti—he immediately decided then and there that we were going to be friends.
Eirik and I especially loved to watch and study the silent classics. Among the films I had were D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, Fritz Lang’s epic masterpiece Metropolis, E. A. Dupont’s remarkably erotic Variety, F. W. Murnau’s horror classic Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, the hilarious Buster Keaton comedy The General, and dozens of others. We would sit watching them projected on the white wall of my small apartment.
Since I remembered that one of my sources for the mail order 8mm films was a company in Los Angeles called Film Classics Exchange, I knew I had to go see this place for myself. I had been intrigued by their tiny ad in some obscure home movie magazine that I came across at the local newsstand, and sent off a money order for one of the titles that they offered for sale—an 8mm print of the famous German expressionist film called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
I had patiently waited for two weeks, but still heard nothing from them. The two weeks turned into two months and I had just about given up hope when about a month or so later the package containing the movie finally arrived. That had been quite a few years ago, and I wondered if that company still existed, but a look in the phone book confirmed that they were still there.
The somewhat dilapidated few blocks on Vermont Avenue between Washington Boulevard and the Santa Monica Freeway was known, at that time, as the old Film Row. Actually, what still existed there was only a shadow of what the Film Row once had been.
Over time, the major studio film exchanges and the larger independent ones had moved to much fancier digs in another part of town. The only major studio holdout at the time was the Universal Pictures film exchange. There now were only a few smaller independent film exchanges left, like Manhattan Films, an old B-film distribution company, and Film Classics Exchange, which had seen its heyday as a distributor of 16mm prints to television, schools and other non-theatrical venues.
The owner, Charlie Tarbox, had a huge library of 16mm movies stored in the vast basement—everything from early German silent classics and scarce English-subtitled French sound films from the 1930s and 1940s to American B-pictures and Westerns—and a warehouse full of rare and esoteric short subjects that ranged from early one-reel films from Biograph, Kalem, Vitagraph, and others to obscure European experimental films and early silent comedies.
As I entered the old dusty storefront at 1977 South Vermont Avenue, I could tell that business was no longer booming at Film Classics Exchange. I was met by a tall, bespectacled man in his early or mid-seventies. He was dressed in a dark suit and he wore a tie and he had a half-smoked cigar dangling from his mouth as he walked slowly out from the back room. He had short, slicked-back black hair, the color of which I suspect came from a bottle. He looked at me questioningly.
“You sure you’re in the right place, kid?” he asked, looking me up and down.
“I think so,” I replied. “This place is Film Classics Exchange, isn’t it?”
“That it is,” he replied as he re-lit his cigar with a wooden match. “What can I do for ya?”
When I told him why I had come, he smiled and I could swear he rubbed his hands together in anticipation of a sale. I got the feeling that the place had not made a sale in a very long time.
The dapper old gentleman introduced himself as Art Burnham. Little did I know then that a lasting friendship would develop between us. Art was the sole employee of Film Classics Exchange. Mr. Tarbox, the owner, was not in, he said as he gave me a grand walking tour of the place.
Walking through the place, I marveled at all of the film prints that had been jam-packed in just about every available space. And when we got to the basement, I stood in awe as I surveyed shelf after shelf filled to the brim with rusting film cans and metal reels of dusty film prints. I had never seen so much film in a single place before. In fact, it was almost too much to take in at once, so Art told me to feel free to come back any time that I was inclined to do so.
Deciding to take Art up on his offer, I returned frequently. Sometimes Charlie Tarbox, a short, fat man also in his late sixties or early seventies and also with a cigar perpetually hanging from his mouth, was there. Charlie delighted in regaling me with fascinating stories about the old days he had spent in the motion picture business on both the East and the West Coast. Not only did he relate his own interesting life experiences but he also had an almost encyclopedic knowledge about the early films and the pioneer film companies on both coasts, and he told me that he was in the process of writing a book about them. Most of the time, however, he wasn’t there at the office.
When Charlie Tarbox wasn’t at the exchange, Art Burnham would tell me stories about his own experiences during the old days in the motion picture business in which he had worked all his life. He had begun by working at a film exchange in his home town of Omaha, Nebraska, starting out as a film cleaner before working his way up to become a film booker. Later he moved to Los Angeles, where he began working at Warner Brothers First National.
At first, he was put in charge of shipping the large, cumbersome phonograph discs which provided the sound for the early Vitaphone talking motion picture films. In those days, the theater projectionist had to synchronize the picture that he was projecting with the large phonograph record playing on the turntable next to the projector. It was a terrible system because not only were the discs difficult to synchronize with the picture but they frequently arrived broken. Eventually, these phonograph records were supplanted by sound-on-film.
Art would take me up and down Film Row and introduce me to some of his old friends and colleagues. One of them, a block away on Cordova Street, was the commercial artist Rudy Escalera who did exploitation film posters as well as the advertising art for the local film distribution arm of Azteca Films. Rudy Escalera was an extremely talented man. He was a commercial artist with the soul of a real artist. Like many others, he had come to Los Angeles from Durango, Mexico, to seek fame and fortune. And, like so many others, he continued to chase a dream that was illusive and unattainable.
He had a family to support, so he compromised his ideals and worked as an architect for a while. Then he landed the Azteca Films contract and ended up becoming one of the most sought-after artists by the exploitation film producers.
From his office on Cordova Street, Rudy began doing freelance advertising art while pursuing his real art in his spare time. Some of the magnificent oil paintings that showcased his fabulous talent hung proudly in his office. Rudy could draw and paint in virtually any style that was required of him.
And he was good, so he became very successful in his chosen profession. He specialized in creating movie posters and advertising campaigns for the only genres of the motion picture business that had opened up to him—the low-budget exploitation film productions that existed on the fringes of the Hollywood movie industry and the newly emerging adult film business.
We had a lot in common. Both of us wanted to do better things, but we both had to make a living to support ourselves and our families. We became very good friends. Rudy was very intelligent, and we would discuss at length our philosophies on aesthetics and eroticism, two subjects on which we shared a mutual interest. We both were determined to play the cards that life had dealt us and emerge as winners. Strangely enough, we both eventually would have some degree of success in our own individual careers: I would go on to make the films that would bring me some degree of success and a limited amount of notoriety, and Rudy would eventually attain financial success and a degree of fame as a popular artist of collectible limited edition plates, such as a series he did for the 1984 Summer Olympics.
Early in 1964, I married Alice Martinez, who I had been living with for almost a year. I had originally met her during a double date to Disneyland that I had gone on with my friend and coworker David Chan. She had been David’s date, but I hadn’t been able to keep my eyes off her huge breasts.
The thing was, she seemed to be as attracted to me as I was to her, and the girl I was with at the time didn’t seem to be attracted to me at all. I think she just wanted a free trip to Disneyland.
A few days later I got Alice’s phone number from David, who admitted that he hadn’t been able to get to first base with her. He told me that I was more than welcome to try. I had always felt that there was no harm in trying, and this time I felt confident that I wouldn’t be rejected, so I called her up and arranged a dinner date.
Our live-in relationship pretty much started after our first date. She had come up to my apartment after I took her out to dinner and spent the night, and then she just never left. I got home from work the next day to find that she had cleaned up the place and done my laundry. We had lived together for the better part of a year, and when she became pregnant, we both sort of decided that getting married would be the proper thing to do.
On November 14, our daughter Amy Karin was born, and we moved into a much larger, brand new apartment about a half-block down the street on Purdue Avenue.
Having a daughter was a totally new experience, and I don’t think that either of us was really prepared for it in many respects. We were both far from mature, in spite of what we might have thought of ourselves at the time.
But Amy was such a pretty little baby that it proved very difficult not to fall head-over-heels in love with her, even though she did tend to cry and scream a lot—usually at the most inconvenient times, like when we decided that we would go out to eat or whenever we were out somewhere shopping or even while trying to enjoy a movie at a drive-in theater.
We had learned early on that having her accompany us to a regular theater to see a movie always turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, so drive-in movies were our only option. At any rate, I ended up seeing a lot of movies that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen.
We discovered, as many young people who have begun a family before being ready to do so sometimes did, that as parents we just had to grin and bear that sort of thing. Alice was able to grin and bear it a little better than I was because of her even temper. I was, I’m ashamed to admit, far more selfish than she was, and prone to resent the sudden, almost total loss of all personal freedom.
Alice quickly made friends with a tall, attractive blonde named Flo Selfman, who lived in the neighboring apartment building. Flo also attended UCLA and was working at some office job as well. Her father owned a small barbecue restaurant in Santa Monica that mostly did a brisk takeout business because his wood-smoked ribs and chicken were actually very delicious.
We enjoyed going there to eat whenever we got a chance and could afford it. Inevitably, whenever we did so, Flo’s dad would talk me into making deliveries for whatever phone-in orders had come in at the time. He didn’t pay me anything, but I got to keep whatever tips I received.
At that time, Flo had a boyfriend named Rogers Turrentine. Rogers, who originally hailed from Kansas City, was very interested in films and filmmaking and, sharing that mutual interest, we became fast friends.
When Rogers discovered that I had a 16mm movie camera and that I was attending film school at UCLA, he told me that he had always wanted to make a film himself, and he asked me how much it would cost to make a short black-and-white film. He thought about what I told him for a long moment before asking if I would be interested in shooting it with my camera. He would write the screenplay and produce as well as star in and direct the film. It sounded like it would be a fun thing to do, so I agreed to it.
Rogers came up with a clever story about a man who had just been released from prison. By using close-ups and shadows simulating bars, we even managed to create a prison set against the cinderblock wall lining the walkway to my apartment building. Using hundred-food rolls of Plus-X and Tri-X black-and-white film stock, I shot the movie with my Bell & Howell 70-DR movie camera using only available light in a variety of locations in Los Angeles and in Long Beach, where we filmed at the Nu Pike Amusement Park on the boardwalk. We also did a bar interior at a place Rogers was familiar with.
After we completed all of the filming, Rogers edited the camera original and recorded the soundtrack—mainly sound effects, as there was no dialogue in the film. Then his good friend, the West Coast Jazz musician Bob Cooper, did the music track. The resulting short film, which was the first film to showcase Turrentine’s remarkable talent, was titled The Release.
Rogers Turrentine eventually went on to an extremely successful television career as a writer, producer, and director. His credits include successful shows as The Rockford Files, Hart to Hart, Knots Landing, Lou Grant, Cagney & Lacey, Magnum, P.I., Hunter, and Northern Exposure.
No matter how immature I was at the time, I fully realized that I now had a family to support and higher rent to pay, so I continued working as much as I was able while going to school. During the months of summer vacation, I worked full-time at Grand Central Market downtown, clerking produce for my uncle Jimmy just as I had done the previous year.
Some of our regular customers included a few of the local restaurants, including a Chinese restaurant on Broadway owned by the beautiful Chinese movie actress Lisa Lu. Lisa Lu had starred alongside James Stewart in a fairly recent movie called The Mountain Road, and was constantly appearing in episodes of various television shows at that time. She was sweet and unassuming and never argued about the prices. She was one of my favorite customers, and I always took exceptionally good care of her.
My uncle Jimmy’s family was usually there to work whenever they were needed. I believe that the entire Chung family, from sons and daughters to grandchildren, all worked there at one time or another. Aside from family, one of the regular full-time workers was a one-eyed Mexican named Juan Ramos, who was pushing fifty and was a real character. Juan was a silent, taciturn man who nearly always looked as if he was angry. In the mornings he usually appeared to be hungover, and in that state he would be ready to snap your head off at the least provocation.
So I was surprised to learn that Juan was also a big movie fan who particularly loved Westerns. I told him about some of the obscure old poverty row B-Westerns that I had watched and collected on film and his face lit up. From that time on, we became good buddies. We spent a great deal of our spare time between customers talking about many of the old B-Westerns we had seen and obscure stars we liked.
I’ve always been a big fan of those cheap B-Westerns I had first seen on television as a child, most of which were so terrible that they were barely watchable unless you took them in the context of the time. What I really found fascinating about them was the fact that most featured big-name cowboy stars from the silent era who found it difficult to survive the coming of talkies because of their lack of acting skill.
Over time, I had managed to amass a huge collection of 16mm prints of them, purchased cheaply probably because no one else wanted them, and it was great to find someone who shared my unusual interest. Later, I would sell my collection to a man of questionable reputation known as Dunahoo the Duper at a small profit over what I had originally paid for them.
Juan was always amazed that I had seen these films and knew about the more obscure silent and early thirties B-movie Western stars like Art Acord, Jack Hoxie, Fred Thompson, Bob Custer, Jack Perrin, Wally Wales, Rex Bell, Bill Cody and Buffalo Bill Jr. from seeing them at the theaters when he was a child. He was even quite familiar with most of the film noir movies that I had seen, and could even name off most of the principal cast members from memory.
The large liquor concession at the front entrance to the market was co-owned by a friendly Jewish guy named Dave Gold. Occasionally Dave would have good buys on bottles of some premium stuff, like imported Bordeaux wine, fifths of various liqueurs, or pints of imported scotch, which he sold me for only ninety-nine cents a bottle. When I asked him how he could sell the stuff so cheaply, he pointed to a small water stain along the bottom of the label and told me that he had picked up a huge lot of distressed stock for next to nothing. He also bought out the remaining stock from stores that were going out of business and always could find good closeout deals from various sources. Naturally, he passed the savings on to his customers, which was only good business practice.
Dave Gold was one of the cleverest and most enterprising businessmen that I ever met. Apparently, his experience hawking his wares at the Grand Central Market liquor store taught him a lot. He told me that when he priced a bottle of wine at ninety-nine cents, they literally flew off the shelves. And that gave him a great idea.
Dave Gold went on to open the first 99 Cents Only Store in Los Angeles, and it proved so successful that in almost no time he opened another, and before long he had a whole chain all over Los Angeles and Southern California. With an uncanny knack for sensing what people would spend money on, Dave’s remarkable buying power as a wholesaler and distributor insured his success. At the time of this writing, Dave’s empire has mushroomed into over 273 stores in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas.
When the fall academic term rolled around, I was ready to go back to college and finally realize my goal of attending film school at UCLA. In the meantime, in spite of the very high rent, excessively heavy traffic, and smog, I had finally come to know and love the new city of Los Angeles that I had become a part of. I felt comfortable here. I felt like I had finally found a place where I truly belonged.