Easy Street

Casual is the word for a couple of days as I let this last rewrite settle in then do a polish and spell check on Saturday and send it off Sunday and shift my focus to something new on Monday and wonder why I'm scheduling myself so much, today. I guess I have too much I see in need of doing and want to get it done before I'm 97...which at the rate I'm aging won't be all that long from now.

The disk I got from Netflix on "The Big Sleep" had a nice little documentary showing the changes made between the first version shot by Howard Hawks -- which I saw on Turner Classic Movies, once, and is pretty clunky -- and the classic version that established Bogie and Bacall as THE couple of the 40's and gave her a seriously long-term career. Added in -- the famous discussion about race horses that drips of sexual double entenres and Bogie's straight-to-the-jaw line to Bacall as he's leaving her boudoir. It's like Hawks and his writers had a year to contemplate the storyline and come up with ways of making it better, and then were given the freedom (and money) to do it. One of the positives about the old studio system.

But seriously, if you haven't seen the movie, you should. It set the standard for LA detective stories. Hmm...wonder if I could write something like that, set in WeHo?