I originally tried to post this 7/22 - here goes another shot, wish me luck, and don't blame me if it comes up twice.
Damn - two guys are killed, the stock market jumps 61 points and celebrations break out everywhere. Sure - they were sh*t, but I wonder if that indicates a shift in the values of the world - the right person is killed and people are happy. Perhaps this is just human nature, but I feel it's immoral, even if they were the enemy. I admit to being a stick in the mud.
One night, back when I was working at the donut shop from 12-8 in the morning (in 1979) I went up to the front door of the shop and it was locked. Inside the Korean owner, Suk Bin Song, and his entire family were inside at the counter, drinking and making merry. He saw me and came to the door. He opened it and said "David - you no have to work tonight. In our country, someone go up to President Park and say BOOM!BOOM!BOOM! So we celebrate, and you no have to work tonight."
One show I watch religiously - every Tuesday, sometimes twice in a night, is "The New Detectives: Case Studies in Forensic Science." It's a dull, dour show about forensic criminal investigations, and I'm hooked on it. What attracts me is the ritual - the show always unfolds in the exactly the same way (except for very early episodes) - there are three cases per episode, and each case is covered in 20 minutes time. The tone of the show is clinical and cold. They never show actual murders or close-ups on autopsies. It has many of the same elements I used to love about Perry Mason (to which I was addicted for something like 15 years.)
Tonight they aired an episode I'd never seen, "Buried Secrets", and during the setup they mentioned that "a Hollywood director goes missing, and he is believed the victim of foul play - but the Police need to find the body." My heart leapt- hey! They're covering the Al Adamson case! I quickly got my VCR rolling.
This felt like they were covering a friend of mine, though I certainly never met Al Adamson. But I had long admired his movies, and even once based a musical composition on soundtrack elements from his 1972 film "Dracula Vs. Frankenstein" (known, not surprisingly, as the "Dracula Vs. Frankenstein Symphony" and not, it turns out, entered in any worklist, but is 8/1986.) Adamson was a maker of exceptionally bad drive-in fare such as "The House of the Blood Monsters" and the famous biker film "Satan's Sadists".
In Al Adamson's films the stories often make no sense, scenes drag on and on and are shot too underexposed to be comprehensible. His direction of actors was so poor that he got bad performances out of good actors. But he made 'em cheap, and they made tons of money at the drive-ins. Funny thing - Al didn't make 'em at all quick though; quite the opposite. He often had several films going at once and when he'd run out of money working on one, he'd work a little while on another. Some of his titles were in production for years. "Dracula Vs. Frankenstein" was the last film for Creighton Chaney (the actor unfortunately known as "Lon Chaney Jr." - not by his choice his stage name) who died in 1968 or so, but the film didn't reach the screens until 1972. When actors would die, Al would just rewrite the script.
What I like about Al Adamson is that his films are "anti-art", not that they are true Dada, but they do represent the absence of any "art" in a filmic sense. I may not like "Alien 2" or "Scary Movie" or "There's Something About Mary", but they are the product of an aesthetic, albeit an aesthetic that does not agree with me. Al Adamson's "aesthetic", such as it was, was more like - get actors, shoot a movie, and hope that the cutter can put it together in a way that it can play in a drive-in.
Since his murder in 1995 rumors have been rampant about what happened and why. I read somewhere that he was buried underneath his jacuzzi and it was probably a mob hit or had to do with drugs. Not so. The story, actually couldn't be sadder. Al Adamson was murdered by the contractor who was remodeling his home - Al took him to task for overcharging him, and in a rage the contractor beat him to death with a hammer. The jacuzzi inside the house was removed and the contractor buried the body in the hole left behind, which he tiled over with a cement floor. Then he skipped town with Al's truck and credit card.
Despite the nature of this "perfect crime", it only took Indio Police six weeks to figure out that this is what probably happened to Al. They got a search warrant and after digging for 18 hours found Al's body buried 46 inches beneath the new tile floor - miserable, tight, dusty work in what had formerly been a bathroom. Not long after, police in Florida picked up the killer at a hotel - he denied ever knowing Al Adamson, even though he was still driving Al's truck and was wearing a suit that had once belonged to him.
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com