Below you’ll find the pages of our Fall 2013/Winter 2014 Catalog in chronological order. Happy browsing!
Hit up our catalog on Tumblr to see what we’ve got on deck for this fall and winter!
Photos from yesterday’s great event with Lauren Beukes, Charlie Huston, and David Morrell at the Breslin in NYC. Hearing our authors talk about their books reminded us that 2013 is going to be a great year.
Suffering from post-Comic Con withdrawal? Get your fix with the below conversation between award-winning writer Ed Brubaker, author of CRIMINAL, SLEEPER and INCOGNITO, among many others, and Duane Swierczynski, originally appearing to celebrate the publication of FUN & GAMES. Hardie endures!
Ed Brubaker: So, Duane – FUN & GAMES, am I right in saying this is your first non-Philadelphia book? (Not counting any co-writing) Did you leave your hometown behind in life and fiction?
Duane Swierczynski: You’re right — this is my first book set in a place other than Philly. I still live in Philadelphia (for the time being), and my fictional heart still lives here, too. But I do cop to a little bit literary wanderlust. The idea for FUN & GAMES, grew out of repeated visits to the Hollywood Hills over the years, and even though I tried (at one point) to set it closer to home, it refused to work anywhere but L.A.
Ed, how important is “place” in your work? You’ve created this brilliant fictional location in CRIMINAL‘s “Center City,” but was that on purpose? Why not, say, Chicago, or Seattle, or NYC?
EB: I think with CRIMINAL, it was to make it like the city in Walter Hill’s The Driver, or to use Chandler’s Bay City and Macdonald’s Santa Teresa as location names. Also, I was a Navy brat, so I don’t have that hometown thing a lot of writers have. I lived in DC (or right across the bridge in Arlington) in the summer of 1979, so I get Pelecanos’ views of it from the little I experienced at age 12, but I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to a lot of crime writers I love is the way their books inhabit a city, in a way I never could, as the always traveling outsider.
I thought you left Philly for the wilds of Florida? Didn’t I read that somewhere?
Okay, so onto FUN & GAMES more in depth. For me, all my stories start somewhere – usually with a character, but sometimes with a story I heard or read, or some little fact that just won’t stop bouncing around in my head. Where did this one come from, Duane, and how quickly did you realize you were writing a series, which is something you’ve never done before?
DS: No… maybe that was Michael Koryta, who divides his time between Indiana or Florida? Or perhaps one of the other personalities in my head has taken up residence in the Sunshine State…
I remember vividly what sparked FUN & GAMES. For a while, Michael Connelly kept a place at the High Tower Apartments… in fact, the *exact* apartment where Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe resided in Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE. Back in 2006, Connelly was kind enough to let me stay there for a few days while I did a few book signings in support of THE BLONDE, and the place just amazed me. To access the place, you took an old-fashioned elevator up a slender tower, then used an outdoor walkway to the front door of the apartment. (If you’ve seen the movie, you know exactly what I’m talking about — remember Marlowe, offering to buy brownies for the nude hippy chicks on the landing?) There are stairs somewhere in the vicinity, but I never used them.
Anyway… at some point I wondered (and I do this often): what if a team of hit men were trying to kill me in this apartment? How would I escape? What would they try to do to force me out? That was the seed that bloomed years later as F&G.
(In fact, the earliest story notes for this novel use the title, “High Tower Drive.”)
I thought I was writing a stand-alone, but realized that it could be a series the moment I sat down with my editor, John Schoenfelder, and we started talking about how the story could be bigger. That the siege of the house in the Hollywood Hills was only the *beginning.*
Interesting you say you start with a character. How does that process work? Do voices “speak” to you? And once you have a character in mind, how does the plot unfold from there? Do you devise the perfect scenario for that character?
EB: I doubt I’ve ever devised the perfect scenario, but yeah… that’s sort of how it goes. I generally start with an idea, say – a bank heist, or a pickpocket… and then the character starts to take shape as I do other things. At some point in the mulling over process, they feel real to me, or I get what part of my mind they’re coming from, and their history starts to take shape and make sense. One of my characters from CRIMINAL, Tracy Lawless, was inspired by wanting to write about brothers and the military at the same time. And his character grew from research and my own past, from growing up on military bases, and from hearing about rape-camps in the former Yugoslavia from my wife’s best friend, who was for a long time an investigator for Human Rights Watch. All those things went in the blender and a few years later, this character came out. But you know, as you write, more details always occur to you. I don’t know everything about any of my characters, but I generally know how they’d react or what they think.
As for plot, those are more difficult to pin down where they spring from – I say from the character, generally, but I’m not sure I know always. It’s a chicken/egg situation, a bit. I know a lot of writers have a character and they go “what do they want?” and that’s where the plot comes in — with me, I look back and see my stuff is more like “what do they want to get away from?” Although, really, they’re the same question.
What about you, with FUN & GAMES, you had your initial inspiration in Connelly’s apartment (and by the way, Elliot Gould, Philip Marlowe, and Michael Connelly, you better have come up with a story while staying there or you aren’t a writer) so how soon did your characters take shape and what did you know about them first?
Find out the answer in Part II of this interview.
Duane Swierczynski is the author of several acclaimed crime thrillers, including Severance Package (Minotaur, 2008), which has been optioned by Lionsgate Films. A regular contributor for Marvel Comics, he lives in Philadelphia with his wife and children. Learn more at www.secretdead.blogspot.com. His first book in the Charlie Hardie series, FUN & GAMES, hits bookstores this week.
A one-time cartoonist, Ed Brubaker has been working as a writer since the early 90s, and in that time his work has won several awards and been translated into eleven languages around the world. He primarily works in comics, but has also written screenplays, and will soon write both story and script for a video game. He currently resides in Seattle, Washington with his wife, Melanie, and many pets.
Two hours before beginning this essay we had yet another encounter with residents of the meth house on the corner, our nearest neighbor to the west. The lead male over there is a cutter, dozens of little slashes have made risen scars on his arms. He has a ponytail, is known well by all cops in town, and never wears a shirt. He accused us of “eyeballing” him as we passed his house, something we have no choice but to do many times a day. The derelict shack has in the past been home to sex criminals, rapists, and pedophiles, other meth users, and some criminals who would have to be called general practitioners—whatever crime looks easiest tonight is what they will be arrested for tomorrow. Meth-heads are the worst to deal with. They are unpredictable and frequently violent after they’ve been sleepless for a few days. We are dedicated to minding our own business about most things, legal or not so much, but cooking meth releases toxins and is a peril to the whole neighborhood. A decade ago there were several houses much like this operating nearby, but they’ve been weeded down to this, the last one, and these tweakers should start packing.
My mother was born less than a hundred yards from my house. She was of the first generation raised in town and played in my yard as a child. I can see the roof of her father’s place from the porch when the leaves are down. Both sides of my family have been in the Ozarks a long time. It was hard from the beginning to eke out a living from thin dirt and wild game, and it stayed hard. The Woodrell side (surnames Mills, Terry, Dunahew, and Profitt) has been here a bit longer than the Daily side (Davidson, DeGeer, Riggs, Shannon). Woodrells arrived on this continent around 1690 and settled in these parts during the 1830s, after Kentucky and Tennessee became too gussied up and easily governed for their taste. The early white settlers came here to avoid the myriad restraints that accompany civilization: sheriffs, taxes, social conformity. They sought isolation. There has never been much belief in the essential fairness of a social order that answers most readily to gold, always assumed the installed powers were corrupt and corruptible, hence to be shunned and avoided, except when you couldn’t and must pay them.
A Davidson ancestor did kill a man in the center of town, before many witnesses, and land, livestock, everything that could be sold had to be sold to buy him out of a conviction, which was done. He’d killed his long-time pal, a man who beat him always in the wrestling contests featured at most picnics, then they got drunk on Washington Avenue and decided to wrestle again in the street. Davidson won this time, as the other man could not stand unaided, and is alleged to have pulled his pistol in victory and said as he shot the pal at his feet, “Now I finally whupped you, I might as well kill your ass, too.” Once the money was spent, this became an act of self-defense and he never did a week in jail. That was over a century ago, but we still remember, and the family of the dead man does, too—as late as the 1970s there was friction when my older brother dated a girl with their name.
I was raised on such stories in exile, and the old stories get rubbed together plenty in the retelling, dates and facts become blended. Did such and such happen in 1885, 1965, or not at all? Is that a DeGeer story or a Dunahew? The violent stories are the first I remember. They are many and fed me as a boy, but now I am more taken with how Grandma Mills lost a slice of nose to disease, how Dad got that patch of skin torn from his leg as a boy when barbed wire snagged him after he’d raided a garden for melons and the gardener spotted him, how Granddad Daily rode a mule to church in the 1920s because he wanted to impress girls. I like trains in the night, dogs baying after coons, the long hours when the wind sings as it channels between hills and hollers and flies along creek beds. I’ve known a thousand plain kindnesses here. It is generally a pleasure to live among so many individuals who refuse to understand even the simplest of social rules if they find them odious. This trait can, of course, raise trouble. I have had a few close relatives do time in the penitentiary, some recently, not for being thieves ever, but always for refusing to take each and every piddling law seriously—trouble is bound to happen once in a while when you love life so wildly.
I believe I became a writer because of my grandmother Woodrell. She was proud that she had attended school to the completion of third grade, but was not quite literate. She worked as a domestic: maid, cook, housekeeper. My grandfather was a drunken bum and fled the family when Dad was tiny. Grandma toted three sons alone, one with leukemia, all hungry, hungry, hungry. At age nine my father became the sole support of the family. Uncle Mills James went off to the Navy, and Uncle Alfred was dying in the main room of the house, so Grandma left work to care for him. Dad carried paper routes, was a rack-boy in a pool hall, where he often slept to avoid hearing his beloved brother fight so hard for breath. On weekends he was given over to a Polish farm family, and he loved them and his days spent there, named me for their son, killed in the war. Dad never turned mean and he never turned criminal, though among his favorite memories from childhood was the one of the night when there was a tapping at his window and the adult Cousin C asked the boy to aid him in escaping the area, for good, and it was done and recounted gleefully. Could scarcely be a rougher upbringing, but Dad found books somehow and dove in deeply, reading whenever still for a moment. War introduced him to the wider world and better libraries, and he liked an awful lot of what he saw and read. It has always been difficult to earn a living in the Ozarks, each generation winnowed as folks depart on the Hillbilly Highway to Detroit, Houston, Cincinnati, Kansas City—Steve Earle sings a great song about this. When I was a toddler Dad took us on the Hillbilly Highway to St Louis so he might earn a decent living there and seek the education he’d dreamed about. He had three sons, a six-hundred-square-foot cracker-box house, with never fewer than five residents, sometimes seven. He worked all day selling metal and for years went to night college at Washington University. I have so many memories of him, a complete grown up, doing homework at the kitchen table, empty beer cans shoved aside as he studied, smoke billowing from his Pall Malls. I always thought homework and school were great privileges. I loved literature young and haven’t been able to kick the habit yet. I think illiterate Grandma put something important into Dad that changed the future for all his sons who cared to notice. At twenty-three I declared that I would be a writer or a nightmare, and he said, “Let’s hope the writing pans out.”
The military is always there for us. I left school at sixteen (I did eventually return and linger there until degrees attached) and joined the marines the week I turned seventeen. I’d been in a little trouble, the kind teenage boys with jaunty attitude problems are wont to find. The Marine Corps was fun—I liked an awful lot of it, was about to be promoted to corporal, but I did sometimes display a peasant reluctance to take orders, which was not well received. Drugs played a part, too, as Vietnam veterans in the barracks introduced me to various dopes, and I liked every flavor I tried. Still do, but I don’t. They called me “profoundly antisocial” on my discharge, but who gives a damn what they think?
Two blocks from my home there is a big old cemetery, and in its acres many relatives are at rest. I walk through often. Sometimes in an odd corner I find kinfolk I hadn’t known were buried there. A Davidson murdered and left in a cave, never solved. A Mills dead in a horrible wreck that we don’t believe was an accident—no proof, but we know the name. Dead babies, flu victims, all that sorrow. I think about the carts pulled by hand across Appalachia, kids and hogs trailing, the years of scratching a subsistence living from ruined dirt. The dirt was always thin but became thinner with the arrival of progress. When the timber barons came to the Ozarks they cut the great forests down to stump and mud, and the mud thinned more with every rainfall. They took all the timber. They left us the stumps. This is the Ozarks I needed to know, and know to the bloody root, in order to write as I do.
Five of Daniel Woodrell’s eight novels were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. A recipient of the PEN West Award, Woodrell lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.
Mulholland Books will publish THE BAYOU TRILOGY: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing and The Ones You Do in April 2011.
Marcia Clark’s second Rachel Knight thriller GUILT BY DEGREES is in bookstores now–and the reviewers love it! John Valeri of The Examiner raves about how the novel “takes the strongest elements from an already assured debut and melded them into near perfection,” while Kirkus proclaims that Knight “transmutes the dull and ordinary into the bright stuff 
of legends…serious fun.” CNN champions its “fast-paced story” that “crackles with authenticity,” and the Financial Times called Clark’s newest a “blade-sharp read.”
Also check out the great love that Marcia’s newest is getting from bloggers like Christian Manifesto, Mystery Scene, The Review Broads, and S. Krishna’s Books.
Nick Santora’s recently released FIFTEEN DIGITS has also been receiving great blogger reviews from the likes of BookReporter and Booking Mama. And don’t miss Nick’s interview at Bitter Lawyer.
Joe R. Lansdale’s EDGE OF DARK WATER continues to earn rave reviews online, 
most recently from White Cat Publications, The Mystery Reader, and Serial Distractions. Kirkus also chimed in, calling the novel “a highly entertaining tour de force.” Even the self-proclaimed World’s Toughest Book Critics can’t resist this one!
In other news, Joss Whedon’s THE AVENGERS film had the biggest opening weekend, ever, by a longshot. Which already has industry blogs like Cinema Blend and LA Times’ 24 Frames pondering just what went so drastically right for the franchise. Two words: HULK…SMASH!
We’d shared this last week, but in case you missed it the first time around, Nick Santora’s video of the opening scene of FIFTEEN DIGITS is leagues better than most book trailers and well worth your time…
Did we missing something sweet? Share it in the comments! We’re always open to suggestions for next week’s post! Get in touch at mulhollandbooks@hbgusa.com or DM us on Twitter.
Looking for more of Dead Man’s Party after yesterday’s Q&A between Duane Swierczynski, writer Jeff Marsick and artist Scott Barnett? Check out the below art and excerpts from issue #2, coming in June 2012.
One of the best single issues of a comic book I read last year was Dead Man’s Party #1, a fast-moving, lean and mean hit man thriller that contained some truly crazy surprises. A few months ago, I had the chance to meet the creators: Jeff Marsick and Scott Barnett. I’ll admit it. I was nervous. Part of me expected to be shot in the head by one of them, while the other spread out some nice plastic sheeting on the floor behind me to catch the splatter. Instead, we talked about life, death, comics, mistaken identities… and of course, grisly murder.
DS: Okay, Jeff and Scott. Let’s say you’re both hitmen. I offer each of you a contract to take out the other. Who would take home the paycheck, and who’d be pushing up daisies?
Scott: Jeff’s definitely bringing home the bacon here. He’s the one with military experience; I imagine he knows about seven different ways to kill me with his eyelid, if he wanted.
Jeff: Yeah, it’d be bad news for Scott and I’d be on the next flight to Vegas. I was an expert marksman with a pistol and rifle in the military and have a fascination with explosives and poisons, so I’ve got an array of options for Scott’s disposal. Then again, I do tend to sleep pretty hard so Scott could probably Columbian necktie me while I’m dreaming about winning an Eisner for DEAD MAN’S PARTY.
I hate when I’m asked this question, but that’s not going to stop me from asking you guys. What, if anything, inspired DEAD MAN’S PARTY? Or are you two just sick, dark bastards?
Scott: That’s actually two separate questions, right?
Jeff: I don’t know, that second part sounds a little rhetorical. It’s like Duane already KNOWS.
Scott: The answer to that part is yes. Yes, we are.
Jeff: So there.
Scott: {laughs} Jeff and I have known each other for years and have spoken often about collaborating on something, but until DEAD MAN’S PARTY, nothing quite stuck. Then one day about a year ago, he e-mailed me and once more suggested a collaboration, quite coincidentally, ONE day after I came up with an idea about a hitman who puts a hit on himself.
Jeff: Scott pitches that and I about hit the floor because I’ve had the SAME idea in my head for, oh, fifteen years or so! It all started as a movie that rolls in my head whenever the titular Oingo Boingo song plays. Can’t explain it, it just happens. This ever gets made into a movie, that song is SO going to be in the soundtrack.
Scott:Jeff added the concept for the ‘party’ as a tradition in the assassin community. Then we mashed our disparate ideas together and came up with this series.
Jeff: We both dig spies, hitmen and cloak and dagger movies and TV shows, so all of that helped shaped our story.
Jeff, how much do you discuss with Scott before you write a script? Do you just ignore him until you have the story just the way you like it? And Scott, what’s the process like from your end? Ever read one of Jeff’s pages and think: “Uh, no. No fucking way”?
Scott: Ooh, ooh- can I answer both parts?
Jeff: What, did you miss the part where he said “JEFF, how much do you discuss…”?
Scott: No, I heard it. I just wanted to comment–
Jeff: It’s not all about you, y’know.
Scott: Wait. It’s not?
Jeff: Anyway…I try—for obvious reasons—to keep all discussion with Scott to an absolute minimum, ignoring him until I can send him a final draft of the script, with the cover page emblazoned: “ALL WORDS WRITTEN HEREIN ARE CONSIDERED CAST IN STONE. DEVIATE EVEN SO MUCH AS BY A COMMA AND YOU WILL BE REPLACED.” Nah, I’m kidding.
Scott: Jeff’s very clever- he actually does both. He confers with me at great length, making me feel like an integral part of the process… and then ignores me and rewrites it, anyway!
Jeff: Guilty as charged. What happens is we’ve got a working outline of beats that we’ve both contributed to and that we think would look awesome. But when I write it, what seemed like a four-page scene is actually only two, or some scene we both thought would just BOOM! off the page but actually kind of sits there under a trombone so sad you can practically hear “wah wah waaaaah” in the background and it needs to be axed. So I have to modify the script on the fly.
Scott: Yeah, I have more than once looked at a finished script and said, “Hmm, that’s not exactly what we talked about… Damn, that’s pretty cool… Okay, let’s do that…”
Jeff: See? I won’t steer us wrong. Much. In all honesty, I actually take pride being the kind of writer that doesn’t grab a concept with both hands and throttle it, enslaving the artist to my own vision. I made sure Scott knew up front (and I remind him sometimes when I feel I might be writing TOO overbearing) that look, this is how the movie plays in MY head. I’m a slave to the DVD in MY grey matter. Just because I write a page with five panels doesn’t mean that’s gospel. Maybe you can do it in four or three. Just as long as the gist of the scene plays out and the dialogue fits, knock yourself out. And in truth, probably 95% of the time I change dialogue or modify the script to adapt to Scott’s artwork. All skirt-blowing aside, I think this is the best sequential storytelling I’ve ever seen him do.
Scott: Thanks, man.
Jeff: De nada.
Scott: Well, as for my end of the process- I read over Jeff’s script and lay it out as if I’m creating a movie with still images, but I also design it to push the reader’s eye in the direction I want, using the conventions of the comic book medium, such as panel layouts, dialogue and sound effects. Once I’m satisfied with the flow, I take photo reference to work from, usually of myself, since I know what I’m looking for, in terms of poses. It’s a combination of photos my wife takes of me based on my art direction and photos I take myself (out of context, these are some of the goofiest photos anyone has ever taken, so if Jeff ever hacks my computer, I’m in a lot of trouble). Then, I draw the pages, ‘paint’ them in marker and do a little retouching in Photoshop. Crime noir, served up cold.
Jeff: Ooh, I like that. “Crime noir, served up cold.” Put that on the website.
Clearly you guys are fans of hitman movies and novels, because you subvert the tropes so brilliantly. Share some of your favorites.
Jeff: Favorite hitmen? Good grief, where do I start? There are real-life killers like Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, Chuckie “The Typewriter” Nicoletti, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (aka Carlos the Jackal) and Mossad operatives. In literature there’s Lawrence Block’s Keller, Barry Eisler’s John Rain, the fantastic “Day of the Jackal” from Frederick Forsyth, Anton Chigurh from Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men” and Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne. In movies you’ve got Javier Bardem’s Chigurh, Matt Damon’s Bourne and Tom Cruise’s Vincent from “Collateral”. Oh, and I’ll even drop some old school on you: Henry Silva as Billy Score in the Burt Reynolds movie, “Sharky’s Machine” AND stuntman Dar Robinson (who, incidentally, set a world record for a stunt in “Sharky’s Machine”) as albino hitman Moke in another Burt Reynolds movie, “Stick”. But I think above and beyond them all, my favorite hitman has to be Jean Reno’s Leon, from “The Professional”.
Scott: He said share SOME of your favorites. Not every one of them.
Jeff: That was a small list. I can go on, y’know.
Scott: Oh, I know. And on and on and on. Now me, I’m less of a hitman fan and more of a general crime fan. For movies, I give the nod to the Bourne trilogy, though. Cool stuff. As for novels, I went through a period where I was reading a lot of non-fiction crime stuff as research for an unrelated series I’d like to do someday. Books that covered pretty much every facet of the criminal justice system, from FBI profilers and real murder cases to SWAT teams and evidence collection (CSI). As for fiction, would I be kissing too much ass to say I just finished your Hell & Gone and loved it?
Jeff: Is there such a thing as kissing too much ass?
Scott: I hope not.
Jeff: Y’know, I’ve read every Duane Swierczynski book that’s out there—
Scott: Hey, you’ve got a little brown on your nose.
Jeff: Quiet, you. Like I said, I’ve read all his books and I can only draw one conclusion: this guy’s got issues, man. I love it.
Scott: And he calls us sick and dark?
Jeff: I know, right?
Do you have a specific number of issues in mind for DEAD MAN’S PARTY? Or is this a story that could keep on going, piling up more dead bodies with every issue?
Jeff: This is actually a funny question. The first outline was four issues. I checked, double-checked, even triple-checked the math. Yep. Four issues. Scott okayed it and the first issue hits the New York Comic Convention proudly proclaiming “#1 of 4″. Convention ends, I sit down ready to start scripting issue two, look at the outline, start plotting out and come up with FIVE issues now. I even start from the END and work BACKWARDS. Yep. Five issues now.
Scott: Yeah, it really needs that fifth issue to really do justice to what we have planned.
Jeff:In my defense, Your Honor, I present Exhibit A: ”The Punisher” mini-series from Marvel in 1986. Issue one said it was four issues, but it ended up being five.
Scott: However, since we’ve started, we’ve developed at least four other story ideas that all take place in this little world.
Jeff: I think it would be cool to create a sort of “Dead Man’s Tales” kind of universe that runs for about fifty issues or so. As long as we can keep doing original and unique stories and don’t turn ourselves into masters of cliche, we’ve got room to run.
Scott: I’m in!
BONUS QUESTION for Scott: Have you forgiven me for inscribing your book to “Steve,” instead of “Scott”? Are you afraid that your alter ego will come to life, a la Stephen King’s THE DARK HALF?
Scott: A little backstory here- Duane graciously reviewed DEAD MAN’S PARTY #1 before it went to print, so when we found out he was at New York Comic Con, I stopped by the Mulholland booth to introduce myself (we hadn’t yet met in person). Duane signed a copy of Hell & Gone for me; just as I returned to the DEAD MAN’S PARTY booth to show it to Jeff, I read what he wrote, “To STEVE- Congrats on Dead Man’s Party! -Duane Swierczynski”. Sonuvabitch! And here I’ve been so careful spelling HIS surname correctly!”
Jeff: Which ain’t easy.
Scott: Exactly. Sowhen I last saw him, I busted his stones about it, and now I think I’ve traumatized him. {Laughs} I’ll say this, though- Duane has now given me this alter ego, which I can blame any poor behavior on. Wasn’t me; it was Steve. I know, isn’t that guy an ass?
Stay tuned tomorrow for an excerpt of Dead Man’s Party.
This essay was originally published at Ebony.com
By all cultural accounts, 1968 was a hellish year for America. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy helped spark the “burn baby burn” sensibility ignited in the streets. It was also during this turbulent period that Paramount Pictures reluctantly agreed to finance Jules Dassin’s remake of the classic film The Informer into militant action film Up Tight.
Moving the action from the streets of Ireland to the ghettos of Ohio, Dassin’s bleak exploration into the world of sharp-dressed Black revolutionaries introduced the Blaxploitation aesthetics that later influenced a crop of Black action films including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Shaft (197), Super Fly (1972) and others.
In addition, the film stars an ensemble of actors that would a few years later become major stars including Ruby Dee (American Gangster), Raymond St. Jacques (Cotton Comes to Harlem), Max Julian (The Mack), Janet MacLachlan (Sounder), Juanita Moore (The Mack), Roscoe Lee Browne (Uptown Saturday Night), James McEachin (Buck and the Preacher) and Dick Anthony Williams.
Best known for his role as the sharp-tongued pimp Pretty Tony in The Mack, this was the film debut for Chicago native Williams. Playing Corbin with the heated coolness of hot ice, his performance was brilliant.
Up Tight, whose original title was The Betrayal, focuses on a group of fictional revolutionaries called The Committee. In his otherwise positive 1969 review of Up Tight, critic Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun Times, “It’s remarkable that a major studio financed and released this film.” However, according to Ebony magazine in November, 1968, the studio did try to bow out on their commitment to bankroll the film.
“Paramount did not want to release the film,” stated co-star then-84-year-old Ruby Dee, who also co-wrote the script, at a 2008 screening of the film at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Afro-Punk Festival. Surprisingly, she had never seen the film prior to the 2008 screening in Brooklyn.
After Dassin passionately argued the project’s relevance, a Paramount executive supposedly said, “I’m crazy, but we’ll do it.” Reportedly, the budget was little over two million dollars.
A New York City native, Dassin grew-up in Harlem and moved to Hollywood in 1940 beginning his career as an apprentice with Alfred Hitchcock. A few years later, proving he too was a visionary filmmaker, Dassin directed the film noir gems Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Night and the City (1950).
In 1951, Dassin’s successful Hollywood career came to a screeching halt when, after being labeled a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he relocating to France. He struggled for a few years after Hollywood studios informed European producers that no Dassin film would ever be distributed in the states.
Unafraid of the repercussions, producer Henri Bérard took a chance in 1955 and hired Dassin to adapt the noir novel Rififi. The film was successful and became the template for future heist flicks including The Anderson Tapes and Ocean’s 11. Yet, while Dassin won the 1955 Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival, it would still be another thirteen years before he was hired by an American company to shoot a movie in the states.
Up Tight opens with stark newsreel styled footage Dassin shot of Martin Luther King’s funeral procession in Atlanta as disgusted and distraught bystanders wept. “As we were finishing the shoot, Dr. King was assassinated, so Jules took his cameras down to Memphis and Atlanta and incorporated some of that footage into the beginning of the film,” Dee explained. “We then rewrote and reshot some of the film to reflect what had just happened.”
Minutes into the movie, the camera pulls back to show a group of young men watching the sad spectacle on a television set inside a rundown Cleveland, Ohio barbershop. “I brought the story to Cleveland because I think Cleveland is more representative of a big American city than any other,” Dassin told the Ohio Plain Dealer at the time.
Shot in a section known as Hough, two years before the community was the scene of an infamous riot that took place over six nights, we see a community in shambles and on the verge of explosion. The tenements and tacky hotels, side streets and steel mills look as though they might blow away in the next storm. In the same way King’s death led to riots in streets major cities, it was used as the motivation behind the crime in Up Tight that sets the pulp fiction aspect of the movie in motion with a failed heist of a gun armory the night of King’s funeral.
“The man from love got his head shot off,” spits Jeannie (Janet MacLachlan), one of the militants. “And all those people learned nothing.” Coldly, the organization’s co-leader B.G., portrayed superbly by Nehru jacket wearing Raymond St. Jacques, replied, “Death is a fast teacher. They’ll learn, it’s clearer now.”
A few scenes later the entire Committee, led by soft-spoken Corbin (Dick Anthony Williams) meet-up inside their headquarters, an abandoned bowling alley. Film World magazine described the location as, “…something out of a Black Power nightmare.”
Two of the film’s stars, Julian Mayfield (Tank Williams) and Ruby Dee (Laurie), co-wrote the script with the director. Originally, Dassin sought Ruby’s husband actor/director/writer Ossie Davis as a co-writer, but he was scheduled to be in Mexico shooting Sydney Pollack’s film Scalphunters starring Burt Lancaster. Having taken his wife to the meeting, Davis suggested Ruby would be just as good behind the typewriter and Dassin took his word.
“Ruby has a very strong, poetic talent,” Dassin told Ebony in November 1968. “Her sense of images, her sense of sound is just marvelous. It was a very full collaboration.” Asked about the film’s title change from The Betrayal to Up Tight, Dee, who is also a Cleveland native, answered, “Jules was very pleased with when the new title was suggested. It was an uptight time. Being Black in America is an uptight situation. If you’re going to survive, you have to loosen-up.”
Dassin’s second script collaborator as well as the Up Tight’s star, was novelist, journalist and stage actor Julian Mayfield. The burly scribe had gotten the gig at the suggestion of co-star Frank Silva, whom he had met a few months before a writer’s conference at Fisk University. Mayfield had just returned to the country after being in exile in Ghana.
Although Up Tight was Mayfield’s first screenplay, his talent as a novelist on The Hit (1957) and The Long Night (1958) had been celebrated in Jet magazine years before the Dassin collaboration. “Julian Mayfield demonstrates with an almost disarming ease that he possesses narrative skill, a sense of dramatic unity and poetic feeling,” they wrote. Though partially forgotten since his death 1985, crime novelist and The Wire writer George Pelecanos reprinted Mayfield’s short story “The Last Days of Duncan Street” D.C. Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic Books) in 2008.
In their shared 1998 autobiography With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together, Dee wrote that director Dassin originally wanted James Earl Jones to play the intoxicated loser who betrays the Black militant organization, his woman, his best friend Johnny Wells and, in the end, himself.
Yet, while writing with Mayfield, the director realized he had the perfect “Tank” sitting next to him. “I don’t feel this will be a film we will be ashamed of,” Mayfield told a reporter in 1968. “Just seeing certain images will be so new, it will blow the minds of many people, Black and white, to see what is going on in this country.”
Working with cinematographer Boris Kaufman, who shot On the Waterfront (1953) and The Pawnbroker (1963), making Up Tight a visually nightmarish film that was arty, brutal and beautiful. Dassin created a claustrophobic cinematic landscape that New York magazine critic Judith Crist described as, “teeming and pulsing one minute, stark in its solitudes and isolations the next.”
“But, it was about the music too,” says Darius James, author of That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ‘Tude. “Booker T. & the MG’s doing ‘Time is Tight’ was the best. This was a few years before the big soul soundtracks like Shaft or Super Fly, and people loved it.”
According to journalist Rob Bowman, author of the fascinating book Soulville USA: The Story of Stax Records (1997), the group was commissioned after the film was completed. In preparation to learning the art of scoring films, bandleader Booker T. spent a week with Quincy Jones.
“Quincy was complimentary when I came to California,” Booker T. told Bowman. “He felt we were equals. He really made me feel good about the music, asking me for advice, for tips about making stuff funky.”
The score was recorded in Paris, where Dassin edited the film, away from the prying eyes of studio executives who had threatened, according to Ruby Dee, to pull the film.
The Up Tight soundtrack spawned Booker T. & the MG’s second biggest single “Time is Tight;” heard in fragments throughout, the complete song serves as the film’s coda. Booker T. wanted to name the song after the film, but didn’t want to confuse the audience with the 1966 Stevie Wonder song of the same name. The single went to #7 on the R&B charts and #6 on the pop charts. In Soulville, writer Bowman says, “‘Time is Tight’ just might be Booker T & the MGs finest moment.”
Cultural critic Greg Tate recalls seeing the Up Tight at a drive-in when he was a kid. “The scene where the hood rains bottles on the cops is still a visceral childhood memory,” Tate explained, still excited forty years later by an especially impressionistic moment in the movie.
While Up Tight remains one of the best gritty political crime features from that period, it was soon, according to Ruby Dee, withdrawn by the studio. Although it can occasionally be seen on late-night television, at repertoire houses or film festivals, Paramount has never released the film on video or DVD.
After the disheartening experience on Up Tight, director Jules Dassin, who died in Athens, Greece in 2008 at the age of 96, never made another movie in America.
Cultural critic Michael A. Gonzales has written cover stories and essays for New York, Wax Poetics, Vibe and XXL. He has also published crime fiction in Needle, Crime Factory, Beat to a Pulp, Pulp Metal and A Twist of Noir. Currently he is completing his Harlem heist novel Uptown Boys.
Prologue
The problem with all you lawyers,” Mauro lectured Spade, “is you think the support staff ’s nothing but replaceable parts—just warm bodies in blue blazers running your files up and down the floors whenever you snap your fingers. You guys treat us like we’re invisible.”
Rich Mauro sat back in the booth and took a pull on his beer. Spade studied him for a moment, then smiled a disconcerting grin— a Cheshire Cat That Ate the Canary kind of thing.
“And that’s why you’re where you are and I’m where I am,” Spade pointed out smugly. “Where you see problems, I see opportunities.”
Jason Spade leaned across the table, over the half-finished Harp’s and the untouched onion rings. In the crowded bar, between the blare of the Smithereens on the jukebox and the howl of drunk Irish electricians toasting some dead union brother, there was no need to whisper, but Jason Spade’s was the kind of idea that demanded secretive tones. Even if whispers weren’t required by the environment, they were called for by the very nature of what he was about to propose.
“The benefit of being invisible,” Jason whispered, looking straight into Mauro’s eyes, “is that people don’t see you when you’re robbing them blind…now, how ’bout you and I get rich, Rich?”
And with that simple question, a chain of events began that changed, destroyed, and ended lives. People would be maimed, tortured, and killed. Millions of dollars would be stolen, then stolen away from the thieves themselves.
It was a question that would eventually make Rich Mauro, Jason Spade, Vicellous “Vice” Green, Dylan Rodriguez, and Eddie Pisorchek suffer beyond measure. Some of them would die because of it.
After it all went down, to the ill informed, it appeared that it happened because of money. But to those who were involved in it, to the guys who were so deep in the mess that it covered their mouths and pushed up into their nostrils, they understood that it all happened for love—love that was pure and real or love that had never been there to begin with, but love nonetheless.
And all of it—every cry of agony, every drop of blood—it all began with that conversation between Rich Mauro and Jason Spade, a conversation that lasted less than fifteen minutes, on a summer night, over a couple of beers in a graffiti-stricken booth in the back of McMahon’s Pub.
Nick Santora was a lawyer before his first screenplay won Best Screenplay of the Competition at the 2001 New York International Independent Film Festival. A co-creator, executive producer, and writer for the hit A&E show Breakout Kings and former writer and co-executive producer of Prison Break, Nick Santora lives in Los Angeles, California.
FIFTEEN DIGITS is now available in bookstores everywhere.
This week Mulholland Books celebrates the publication of National Bestseller Nick Santora’s second novel FIFTEEN DIGITS with a week-long extravaganza of great content. Read on for an interview between Nick Santora and actor Jimmi Simpson of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Santora’s hit show Breakout Kings, on working together, Nick’s writing, Jimmi’s writing, and Nick’s acting.
Mulholland Books: How did you guys meet?
Nick Santora: At the 2009 Stringfellows Male Exotic Dancers Convention. We started out competitors but ended up friends.
Jimmi Simpson: Please don’t start this interview with lies, Nick.
Nick: Sorry.
Jimmi: It was the 2008 Stringfellows Convention. And we’re not friends.
How did you guys actually meet?
Jimmi: Well, Nick was trying to woo me into the project so he took me out for a fancy breakfast.
Really? Where?
Jimmi: McDonalds.
Very funny.
Nick: He’s not kidding. I took him to McDonalds. I bought him a coffee. To everyone in Hollywood, you should know it costs exactly $1.04 to get Jimmi Simpson to do your show.
Jimmi: I have very low self-esteem. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia got me for a tootsie roll and a packet of mustard.
Nick: That’s actually good for basic cable – I wouldn’t think they’d throw in the mustard.
And you guys work on a drama?
Jimmi: Yup.
Nick: Duh.
Nick, did you always know you wanted Jimmi for the role of Lloyd Lowery in A&E’s BREAKOUT KINGS?
Nick: Absolutely. I am a huge of fan of ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILAPELPHA. My co-creator on the series, Matt Olmstead, worked with Jimmi on LAW & ORDER so he was well aware of his talent, too. Jimmi is genius in everything he does – you’d be crazy not to want him on your show, not to want him as a collaborator, not to want him sexually.
Jimmi: I appreciate the support Nick, but we both know you originally offered the role to Ricky Lake and she passed.
Nick: Ya gotta reach for the stars…
Jimmi, the Showrunner of the show you’re a star of is also a novelist. Do you think he spreads himself to thin?
Jimmi: However Nick chooses to spread himself, I know it will be smooth and velvety like talent-flavored cream cheese.
Have you read any of Nick’s books?
Jimmi: I’ve read SLIP & FALL and loved it. I just finished FIFTEEN DIGITS and think it’s amazing. Nick’s ability to create and write for characters is one of the reasons he’s so highly regarded in this industry. This book is a perfect example of that. It reminded me that I love reading really cool crime fiction. FIFTEEN DIGITS is a roller-coaster ride of thrills and anxiety. Kinda like watching Nick thinking about picking up the check for dinner.
Nick: That is such garbage! I pick up the tab all the time!
Jimmi: And then hand it to someone else.
Nick: Need I remind of the McDonanld’s coffee?
Nick, other side of the coin now. You have a lead on your show who is also a writer as Jimmi recently signed on to write a pilot for 20th Century Fox.
Nick: What?! This is the first I’ve heard it! Jimmi, you’re fired.
Jimmi: Good. I can concentrate on my writing.
Nick: In all seriousness … I hate Jimmi. ‘Cause writing is kind of his “hobby”. Not that he doesn’t take it VERY seriously, he does, but it’s his hobby in the sense that he has spent the majority of his career, to this point, focusing on acting. But then he started writing on the side. And I’ve read his stuff. And it’s phenomenal. It’s better than phenomenal. It’s like when Michael Jordan decided to play baseball. What people don’t realize or remember is that Jordan had the longest hitting streak in his league that year and then became one of the best players in the Arizona Fall League. And it was his freakin’ hobby! So, I guess what I’m saying is, Jimmi Simpson is just like Michael Jordan in that he excels at something he hasn’t even begun to fully explore yet. And he’s Black.
Jimmi: He’s not being flippant about race – he’s referring to the color of my soul.
Nick: My point is, Jimmi could be, if he wanted to, running his own show today. I’ve read something like a billion scripts from writers in the business, from writers who want to be in the business, whatever – and Jimmi’s stuff is head, shoulders, pancreas and feet above all of it. I would work for Jimmi on one of his shows tomorrow.
Jimmi: Speaking of crossing over, the novelist/screenwriter/showrunner next to me also happens to be a budding thesp.
Thesp?
Jimmi: Actor. They call them ‘thesps’. Industry thing. You’ll pick it up soon enough.
Thanks.
Jimmi: Sure. But Nick here made his screen debut-
Nick: It was hardly a “debut”-
Jimmi: IT WAS A DEBUT, MAN! You presented yourself to the world. You stepped in front of that camera and were like, “Here I am baby! Get it while it’s hot!”.
Nick: Well, thank you.
Jimmi: Thank YOU. For the gift of your acting.
Are you being sarcastic, Jimmi?
Jimmi: No. No I am not.
Nick: He is.
Jimmi: I certainly am not. Nick took the role of Prison Guard in the season finale of BREAKOUT KINGS and elevated it to new heights. Those baby browns he’s got can bore a whole into your soul. Some serious Omar Shariff shit.
Nick: I wasn’t a damn Prison Guard. I was U.S. Marshal.
Jimmi: Oh. Sorry.
Nick: Mollo.
Jimmi: What’s that?
Nick: His name. My character’s name. It wasn’t just “U.S. Marshal”.
Jimmi: You gave your character a name?
Nick: And a rich and complex backstory.
Jimmi: Oh. Interesting. Did you utilize that in the filming of the scene?
Nick: YOU WERE IN THE SCENE WITH ME!
Jimmi: Right. Right. Which guy were you again?
Nick: This interview is over. Just please buy my book – FIFTEEN DIGITS – so I don’t have to work with this guy anymore.
Jimmi: You love me.
Nick: I do.
FIFTEEN DIGITS is now available in bookstores everywhere. Read more of Nick’s work at WWW.NICKSANTORA.COM.
JIMMI SIMPSON stars in A&E’s BREAKOUT KINGS (check local listings) and can be seen in the upcoming film ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE KILLER (June 2012).
