pjwoodall1

i've met Conrad brooks at the local antique and collectibles shows and made the mistake of buying this and getting it autographed. i finally decided it wasn't worth the effort. i don't know if brooks remembers me, but he's stopped telling me he was in the worst movie of all time. i've seen worse than PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE(NEKROMATIK 2 anyone?). he still tries to get me to buy his other movies. i once asked him what he thought of ED WOOD, and he said it was a bunch of lies. i didn't ask him why he appeared in it then. still brooks can be entertaining. Edd Byrne's seemed to resent that my wife's wheelchair prevented his fans from getting autograph. i still remember getting a rise of out Lana wood when i asked her about john Wayne killing her sister in THE SEARCHERS. "john Wayne didn't kill my sister," she snapped. i found that theory in CELLULOID INDIANS, a book on how Hollywood has treated native Americans on film.

I used to live down the street from Ross Thomas in DC and never had the chance to meet him. According to a story in the POST, Thomas and his wife went out to Hollywood to see the filming. Bronson told him "I didn't read the book." Thomas replied "That's OK. I didn't see your last movie." Bronson was not Thomas' or my idea of the St. Ives character. St. Ives was a thinking man's detective with a wry sense of humor. Bronson was capable of wry humor but he was miscast if you had read the books. I think it was the Thomas novel filmed which is a shame. I think Charles Durning starred in a made-for-TV movie where he played a similar character who is a professional go-between.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote an "impossible' crime story about a train that vanishes into thin air. A famous retired detective, who is unnamed, lends his thoughts to solving the case. Two Republic westerns, The Great Train Robbery and William Elliott's THE LAST BANDIT seem to borrow the basic mystery and its solution. If I'm not mistaken a 1930's serial THE LOST SPECIAL also involves a missing train. I also remember seeing a very clever animated film in which Holmes solves a similar problem with pure logic at the American Film Institute when they did a series of Sherlock Holmes movies. If you want to stretch a point, Banacek once explained how a flat car can vanish from the middle of a moving train. As far as I know nobody credits Conan Doyle with the original story