Westlake was a hell of a prolific writer. He started in 1960 and delivered books faster than his agent thought he should. Supposedly it was bad to try to promote more than one book in a year, so he started using pseudonyms. Under the Westlake name he wrote around 50 books – add in the pen names and that number doubles. Movies based on his books include THE HOT ROCK (a fun Robert Redford heist comedy recently reviewed by Quint), BANK SHOT, A SLIGHT CASE OF MURDER and the most recent Costa-Gavras movie THE AX. He was also a screenwriter who sometimes adapted other writers – Patricia Highsmith for RIPLEY UNDER GROUND, Dashiel Hammett for a TV anthology, Jim Thompson for THE GRIFTERS (he was nominated for an Oscar for that one). Personally I think his best screenplay is THE STEPFATHER, which does such a great job of including dark satire of ’80s family values in the subtext of an effective thriller. He was often known for lighthearted and goofy material but he was definitely good at the mechanics of a tight mystery or thriller story.

The reason this one hits me hard is that one of the other writers hidden beneath the friendly Westlake exterior was Richard Stark. If you had asked me yesterday I would’ve told you Stark was my favorite living writer. Aside from four spinoffs about an actor/thief named Grofield, Stark’s entire output was the 24 novels of the Parker series. These are the sparsely written, ridiculously badass adventures of a guy who plans heists, then leads the team executing them. He’s the best at what he does, knows how to work with the best people, and is usually disciplined enough to follow his rules and obey his instincts. But something always goes wrong anyway and that’s his other job, the problem solver. The guy who cleans up the mess. Usually, but not always, he’s able to outsmart and outfight everybody and get away with his ass intact, and most of the loot.

Part of what makes Parker a fascinating character, somehow, is his lack of humanity. He’s all business. He doesn’t have quirks, hobbies, or emotions. He doesn’t have attachments. He only sees women after a job, not during. Too risky. In so many crime stories the smartest guy still gets screwed because he thinks with his dick. Parker knows not to do that.

Parker has been put on film many times, but with more humanity and (like Westlake) not under his original name. The best and most famous is POINT BLANK starring Lee Marvin and based on the first Parker book, The Hunter. Marvin is so god damn tough as “Walker” that it’s hard not to think of him as the perfect image of Parker, even though the character (and arty feel) are pretty different from the pulpy, straightforward novel. Other actors have followed but, like pretty much all men, they’re no Lee Marvin.

One notable not-Lee-Marvin is Mel Gibson, who played “Porter” in PAYBACK, also based on The Hunter. I think both the fun theatrical version and the more harsh director’s cut are worth watching, and even if it’s not as good a movie as POINT BLANK it’s a little closer to Westlake’s characterization. Too bad they didn’t turn it into a series like James Bond. They wouldn’t even have to keep Gibson, because in the second book (The Man With the Getaway Face) he gets plastic surgery to hide out.

Another good Stark-based movie is THE OUTFIT starring Robert Duvall as “Macklin.” That one’s based on my favorite of the books, the third one, where he gets fed up running from the criminal organization he pissed off in The Hunter/Point Blank/Payback and takes the war to them. He convinces all his friends to simultaneously rob the Outfit’s affiliates, so you get several heists for the price of one. The book is better, of course, but the movie’s good. It was directed by John (OUT FOR JUSTICE) Flynn but, like his masterpiece ROLLING THUNDER, has only been released on VHS. Both are well worth searching for.

Lesser Parker-based movies include Godard’s MADE IN U.S.A. (supposedly based on The Jugger, but to me it just seemed like tedious new wave fucking around with American iconography) and the okay SLAYGROUND with Peter Coyote as “Stone.” Then there are two not on video in the U.S. so I have no idea how good they are: THE SPLIT (with Jim Brown as “McClain”!) and the French MISE A SAC (based on The Score, a great book where Parker’s crew tries to take down a whole mining town).

Westlake wrote all his books on manual typewriters, but he he still managed to have a good (if rarely updated) donaldwestlake.com. He was still writing at 75, and the Parker novels were still going. I’m not sure if he would have wanted to write a last one or not, but it turns out the last one is last year’s Dirty Money. He had stopped in ‘74 but started up again with Comeback in ‘97. I can’t vouch for the new ones because I haven’t gotten to them yet – I was reading them in order and I can’t find The Sour Lemon Score. Then I have a couple books after that but when I get to Plunder Squad and Butcher’s Moon I’m fucked

I highly recommend reading The Hunter and any others you can find. The first three are supposed to be adapted into comic books in the next couple years, but I dare you to read them without pictures first. For more information check out The Violent World of Parker. Also, talkbackers please recommend your favorite of Westlake’s non-Parker books. 361 was a nice and brutal one reprinted by Hard Case Crime, but I would like to be enlightened about the many other styles he wrote in.

Donald Westlake, aka Richard Stark/Tucker Coe/Samuel Holt/Edwin West/Curt Clark/Timothy J. Culver/John B. Allan/J. Morgan Cunningham

1933-2008

Originally published at Aint-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/39641

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Well, Mel Gibson is no Lee Marvin and writer/director Brian Helgeland (A Knight’s Tale) is no John Boorman. But I think Payback is an underrated movie. It’s a good balance of vicious and funny. It’s got a bit of a ’70s throwback feel and lots of weird touches to make it an indistinct time period. There are rotary phones, and primitive credit card technology that makes fraud more convenient, and the film is washed out with bleach making everything have a pale blue tint to it. You’re not sure when this is supposed to be taking place, which in a weird way reminds me of the experience of reading the books. Most of it reads pretty modern but obviously you are dealing with armed robbers, there is money, communication and security technology that would make some of the stories impossible today. So I sometimes have to check the copyright dates to be sure when this would’ve happened.

Point Blank is the best movie based on those books, but it’s not really faithful to their tone. It’s much more arty, and “Walker” (as Lee Marvin’s Parker character is called) is much more emotional. There’s even a part where he sits on a couch being sad for a long time. They always gotta give Parker too many normal human attachments in the movie adaptations. I think Payback is a little closer to the feel of the book. You side with him, but he always does things that make you think, like James Coburn’s character says, “Man, that’s just mean!”

Let me give you an example of how tough this movie is. Right now the current movie everybody I know is talking about is Grindhouse. In that movie, Freddy Rodriguez plays a guy who is pretty much supposed to be the toughest, most skilled motherfucker on the planet. In Payback, Mel Gibson as “Porter” beats the living shit out of Freddy Rodriguez. He grabs him by the head and tosses him against a wall. Freddy pulls a gun, Porter quickly grabs it out of his hand, punches him in the stomach, nearly makes him puke. Then he turns him around and frisks him. Then he punches him four or five times in the kidneys. Then he rips out his nose ring. Watching the movie back in 1999 I thought “Jesus, they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” and watching it again the other day I thought the same thing.

However, there has always been a dark cloud over Payback. You see, when the movie was test screened, the studio and the producer (who happened to be Mel Gibson) got scared. Apparently they all agreed it wasn’t working, but Helgeland just wanted to work on the very end of the movie. The other people thought it needed to be completely reworked to be more audience friendly. Gibson had the last act rewritten, but Helgeland simply was not interested in doing extensive reshoots, he didn’t know how to imagine the movie any other way than what he had. Because he was the producer of the movie, director’s guild rules wouldn’t allow Gibson to take over as director. The rumor at the time was that he hired his hairdresser as the “director,” really just acting as a mouthpiece for Gibson.

What they came up with was a much different version. They added more explanation to Porter’s coming back from the dead at the beginning. They added voiceovers to make him more into a film noir anti-hero. They gave it a happy ending, obviously. In fact they rewrote and reshot the entire third act with a kidnapping plot that wasn’t in there before. Kris Kristofferson was added as the lead villain Bronson — in Helgeland’s version Bronson was just Angie Dickinson’s voice over a speaker phone.

For years I’ve had a shitty VHS bootleg of Helgeland’s unfinished cut, so I knew how different it was. But honestly I liked both versions equally. Some of the cheesier elements of the movie (like the way he blows up a car) I think were added in Gibson’s version, but I like some of what he added too. The story does seem to build to a more exciting climax, so there is something to say for being more Hollywood. And it’s not like they completely toned it down. I mean, that version opens with a sleazy back alley abortionist prying bullets out of Porter’s back. And one of the ways they made him more “heroic” was to have the bad guys smash his toes with a hammer.

So I always liked both versions about equally, but the studio version wasn’t exactly beloved by many, and there was always this bad aftertaste about it because this underdog Helgeland got so fucked over. A couple days after he won an Academy Award, too. But I believe it was either Howard Zinn or the dad from The Simpsons who said “Did Braveheart run away? Did Payback run away?” And the answer, to the second one at least, is no. Last Tuesday something that I never thought would happen actually happened: Paramount released Payback — Straight Up: the Director’s Cut to DVD and various high tech space technologies.

This Straight Up version is an entirely different movie. It’s not even like that old bootleg I have. Helgeland went back and recut the movie from scratch (on film, even). He rescored it and they even re-processed it, so it doesn’t have that blue tint anymore, but a more subtle digitally created washed out look.

It does have that original third act (now with Sally Kellerman’s voice as Bronson, for some reason) but even the earlier scenes feel new. The whole tone is different. Most of it no longer feels like you should be laughing. There’s a very disturbing new scene early on where Porter beats up his wife, played by Deborah Kara Unger, and shows her a photo. It’s only later, in a flashback, that you learn she was the one who shot him in the back, and what the meaning of the photo is. It’s a tricky move — he lets you wonder for a while what you’re supposed to think of this guy. Then you see the flashback and realize oh, okay, he’s not such a monster after all. But still, what a bastard.

The weird thing is, I still think there’s enough room in the world for both Payback and Point Blank, but now that I see this darker, more serious version I realize that it’s not as different from Point Blank as it used to be. The new music actually makes everything seem much grimmer, not as wiseass as it was before. The opening theme is not as funky as it used to be, but otherwise I think the new score is a huge improvement. No more Lethal Weapon style guitar noodling, no unnecessary use of a Jimi Hendrix song. The movie is also more fast paced now, they cut out 11 minutes. And in retrospect, there was a lot of contrived Hollywood business in that theatrical cut — we really don’t need to see Porter blowing up a car from a gas trail and all that shit, do we?

The DVD doesn’t include the theatrical version of the movie, but otherwise it has everything you would want: a commentary track, a couple really in-depth documentaries, even an interview with Richard Stark expert Donald L. Westlake.

One documentary goes through the whole history of the director’s cut and how it was made. They talk fairly openly about the disagreements, and Helgeland seems pretty forgiving about it. Gibson deserves credit not only for helping Helgeland to get this cut made and released, but for actually being interviewed in the extras. And he did the interview when he was sporting that crazy Apocalypto beard, too. So we have that one archived for posterity. Gibson does seem a little defensive about his part in the whole fiasco, and only halfway convincing in his argument that “you can’t make a movie for an elite” and need to appeal to a broad audience every time. But I still can’t believe he was willing to talk about it. I guess after his whole anti-semitic thing he’s used to coming out and taking his lumps.

The one topic they completely avoid is who actually directed the reshoots. I have had a pet theory for a few years now, I believe it was Paul Abascal, director of the 2004 Gibson-produced (and completely insane) action movie Paparazzi. The director was rumored to be Gibson’s hairdresser, as Abascal was on the Lethal Weapon series. His first directorial works were “Mel Gibson’s Video Diaries” for some of the Lethal Weapon pictures, so he fits the profile of a director willing to work as a mouthpiece for Mel Gibson. He also directed some TV here and there, but his first official movie directing credit was Paparazzi, a movie produced by Gibson, from an idea by Gibson, clearly based on the life of Gibson (it’s about the star of a popular action movie series being harassed by photographers). So when I saw that movie I thought wait a minute. Maybe it really was Gibson’s hairdresser directing the reshoots, but not just as a proxy for Gibson. Maybe he really is a director.

The new Payback DVD does not confirm or deny my theory, but IMDb does. Some time between now and when Paparazzi came out, somebody added production designer John Myhre as the uncredited director of the reshoots. I don’t know where that information comes from, but it is not as cool as my theory. So this one will have to end like Zodiac — here I am, finally satisfied with my conclusion, but seemingly disproven in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Oh well. The important thing is, we now have two Paybacks. I think I officially like the director’s cut better, but I’m keeping both versions. Now there’s one Paparazzi in the world, two Paybacks — that seems about right. Life isn’t too bad.

Originally published at Screengrab: http://www.nervepop.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e10692#10692

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Flynn is not a director that has been intensely studied, you’re not gonna find a whole lot of information on him (although Shock Cinema did an interview with him a couple years ago.) I really know nothing about John Flynn the man, but since I’m very fond of three of his movies in particular Moriarty asked me to write up a little something.

Mr. Flynn’s most famous movie, the one every one of you should see, and my number one “FOR GOD’S SAKE WOULD YOU PEOPLE PLEASE PUT THIS OUT ON DVD?” pick since POINT BLANK came out is ROLLING THUNDER. Written by Paul Schrader, this movie is in the vein of TAXI DRIVER if it was a little more of a straight ahead revenge movie. William Devane plays a Vietnam vet who comes home to a hero’s welcome, but becomes very distant and feels nobody understands him. Things get worse when he gets robbed and loses his hand to a garbage disposal. He definitely has more to complain about than John Rambo in FIRST BLOOD. So later there is revenge.

I don’t really know a way to describe the plot without making it sound cheaper and dumber than it really is. This was one of the first movies to deal with Vietnam vets coming home to find that things just aren’t the same anymore, a theme that is unfortunately still pretty potent today. But that’s just one level. More importantly, it works as pure badass cinema. And that’s just about my favorite thing in movies: a real effective tough guy film that underneath also has something to say about the world.

There’s a great scene where Devane goes to get his buddy Tommy Lee Jones to go on a revenge rampage with him. He interrupts the family dinner walking in in full uniform, and Tommy Lee, without hesitation, just gets up from the table and joins him. He just looks at him and he knows. That’s one of my favorite moments in any movie because it’s that great “oh shit, it’s on” moment of badass anticipation, and at the same time it shows how really only another guy who was in Vietnam can truly understand him.

Another favorite (also not on DVD, for crying out loud) is THE OUTFIT. I thought I was about the only guy who cared about this one until I saw Harry mention it a couple times in the last year or so, apparently they played it down there in Austin. THE OUTFIT caught my interest because it’s based on Richard Stark’s third Parker novel. If you’re not familiar with the Parker novels, the first one (called The Hunter) was the basis for both POINT BLANK and PAYBACK. A couple of the later ones were also made into movies – Slayground was a movie starring Peter Coyote, The Seventh became THE SPLIT starring Jim Brown (never on video), the Jugger was the very, very loose basis of a pretty terrible Godard movie called MADE IN USA.

Well, THE OUTFIT is either the second or third best movie based on a Parker novel, depending on how you feel about PAYBACK. Robert Duvall plays the Parker character in this one. It’s actually a pretty direct sequel to The Hunter/POINT BLANK/PAYBACK because in that one Parker pisses off the organized crime corporation called The Outfit, in the second one (The Man With the Getaway Face) he goes on the run, and in this one he gets fed up and convinces his friends to all rob Outfit-run businesses at the same time. No more running. For the movie Flynn (who wrote the screenplay too) added a different motive (they killed his brother) and like most of the adaptations he makes the character more sympathetic. But Duvall is a mean, tough bastard, there’s a really good score and the movie has a real momentum to it. As an added bonus to fans of the books you get to see a few of the recurring characters, including Parker’s long time partner Handy McCay (called Cody and played by Joe Don Baker). Robert Ryan’s character Mailer, by the way, is based on the same character William Devane played in PAYBACK.

The third great movie by John Flynn is – and please, hear me out on this one – OUT FOR JUSTICE starring Steven Seagal. I know you guys are gonna laugh at this one because most of you are not Seagalogists like I am. But it was when I saw this that I looked up John Flynn and made the connection that it was the same guy who did ROLLING THUNDER and THE OUTFIT. Due to my vocation I’ve seen every movie Seagal has ever made several times, and I have long been convinced that OUT FOR JUSTICE is the best directed and most genuinely badass of all of them. In fact, Flynn is one of the very few directors who managed to put his own stylistic stamp on a Seagal picture. It’s not the funniest or most representative Seagal picture, but it’s my favorite.

If this movie starred William Devane or Robert Duvall I’m sure it would be more respectable like those other two. Instead it has my man Seagal struggling to do a New York Italian-American accent, which is admittedly pretty laughable at times. But it has Seagal at his meanest, some of his best fights ever, and the most distinctive story of any of his movies (although I wish they would’ve cut out that epilogue where the dog pees on the guy’s head). It looks and sounds different from all the other Seagal pictures. The score is by the same guy who did the noodly guitars of ABOVE THE LAW and HARD TO KILL but it’s a more ominous and timeless sound that hits you in the balls like Seagal would do if you happened to be in the bar where he comes looking for Richie. Or if you were mean to a dog.

Stylistically the movie is great too. The cinematography is grey and gritty. I love the way they shot the bumpy car chase. With the intense camerawork and the appearance of Jerry Orbach it seems to be the long lost father of all the cop shows they have now. This movie also has hands down, by about a hundred miles, the greatest opening credits of any Seagal movie and most action movies of the era. The scene involves Seagal throwing a pimp by his tie into some garbage, then tossing him headfirst into a car window. There’s a menacing shot looking up at Seagal through the hole in the windshield, it freezes on his mean face and says STEVEN SEAGAL (filling up the whole god damn screen) and then OUT FOR JUSTICE.

Some other Flynn movies you might’ve seen include Stallone’s prison movie LOCK UP and the morbid and in my opinion cheesy horror movie BRAINSCAN, which was the first movie written by Andrew Kevin Walker. Although he was always gravitating to these genre movies, Flynn actually started out pretty serious with 1968’s THE SERGEANT. Rod Steiger apparently plays a macho army sergeant who has to deal with his repressed homosexuality when he realizes he’s attracted to a private played by John Phillip Law. That’s not a movie you’d expect from the director of OUT FOR JUSTICE, or subject matter you’d expect to see in 1968, so maybe it’s another one they oughta put out on DVD. Come on people, you got every season of GOLDEN GIRLS I think we can start getting to some of these John Flynn movies now.

Anyway, it’s too bad. I think we lost an uncharted titan of Badass Cinema this week. But of course some people out there lost a friend and family member, so best wishes to them. Rest in peace John Flynn, and thank you for taking the time to kick our asses.

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Most of you fuckers probaly think Donald E. Westlake is just the creator of your precious Father Dowling Mysteries*, but actually he’s got a whole big resume behind him. In fact, in these parts he’s more famous as Richard Stark. I’m not sure which one is the real guy and which one is the alter ego but Richard Stark is the hard motherfucker who wrote the Parker books I love so much. Twenty Parker novels so far and also four about Parker’s part-time actor, part-time thief associate Grofield. Stark’s books inspired POINT BLANK, PAYBACK and several not as memorable but pretty good movies.

[*I'm just jerkin your chain there bud, I never watched that show either]

And then Donald E. Westlake writes funnier ones, they say. Richard Stark is his dark side, they say. (Stephen King even named the dark half character in The Dark Half George Stark.) But I am here to tell you that Westlake has two sides to him regardless of Stark. And the proof is right here with THE HOT ROCK, a goofy light-hearted heist comedy based on one of his books, and THE STEPFATHER, a fucked up horror/suspense/family values satire that he actually wrote the script for.

THE HOT ROCK is from one of the Dortmunder novels, I never read em but judging from this movie he’s the opposite of Parker: a thief with a sense of humor that has fun with what he’s doing. Robert Redford plays John Dortmunder. Fresh out of the joint and George Segal (his brother in law, no relation to Steven Seagal) already has him on a job trying to steal a jewel from some museum.

Basically the plot is they gotta steal this rock, but every time they do they fuck up and then have to go steal it from somewhere else. Like the first time they almost get away except the guy with the stone gets caught. So he runs around the corner and swallows it first. Then Dortmunder and the gang gotta break him out – not sure if it’s for his sake, or for the rock only. Anyway it turns out he doesn’t have it anymore, he hid it in a cell at the police station before he got transferred. So now they gotta break into the police station. Etc.

Most of the fun of the movie is with the ridiculously ambitious schemes they come up with for the attempted scores. Like their first plan involves a stunt driver flipping a car and catching on fire in order to distract the guards. A fake doctor is also involved. When they gotta break into the police station they actually wear uniforms and land a police helicopter on the roof of the headquarters. (first they land on the wrong building and have to ask directions.) Once they’re there they start tossing bombs everywhere and the captain actually thinks it’s the start of the revolution and announces he’ll be damned if his is the first American police station to go down. That part was almost worthy of Dr. Strangelove.

The character “Policeman” – the cop that first sees the bombs going off – is played by Christopher Guest, director of Best In Show and all those ones. I believe he is playing the same character as in Death Wish where he is called “Patrolman Reilly.” In that one he’s the cop who identifies Charles Bronson as the vigilante killer and tells his superior, who decides to let Bronson go. In the early seventies, if shit was goin down in New York, Patrolman Reilly was gonna be there.

This is a crime picture but it’s not a badass picture at all. It’s all about comedy. Lots of goofy shit happens, like they surreptitiously meet with their connection in a park, sitting on separate benches and not looking at each other. All the sudden an old lady sits on the bench between them and they don’t know what to do. That kind of thing. I mean, you got George Segal and Zero Mostel in the cast, obviously we’re not talking Point Blank here. The tone is so light you even see the World Trade Center towers under construction during the helicopter scene. Because this is before 9-11 changed everything and made the eagle cry. When movies didn’t have to bum you out.

What this movie reminded me of is why everybody used to love Robert Redford so much. He’s just a real likable dude. For you young folks, he’s got George Clooney’s charm but with Brad Pitt’s blonde pretty boy looks. He’s a one man Ocean’s 11. This was a fun light-hearted movie sort of in that vein, but maybe a little cornier.

THE STEPFATHER is not in that vein at all. If this is a crime movie it’s because killing your wife and daughter is a crime. Or if it’s not then it should be, in my opinion. Well yeah, actually come to think of it it is a crime I believe so scratch that last sentence. Anyway what I’m trying to say is this is an ’80s horror/suspense thriller, kind of feels like one of those Psycho sequels they made back then. At first I thought it would be cheesy because it has one of those ’80s scores that wants to sound like a whole orchestra but who are they foolin, we all know it’s just one measly keyboard. Sounds like the Full Moon Videos they used to have, about all those little fuckers running around on the ground with knives and crap. Haunted puppets and killer ghoulies and shit.

But this one’s not like that, it’s smart and disturbing and maybe even classy. According to an interview I read, Donald Westlake was hired to write a script based on a one line treatment, which was itself based on an actual case. Some nutbag somewhere killed his own family and disappeared, and they found out that three weeks before he killed them he had quit his job, and every day pretended he was going in to work. The idea of the movie is, what the fuck was this guy doing from nine to five during those three weeks? And the movie’s answer is he was setting up a replacement family across town.

The killer stepfather is played by Terry O’Quinn, who now is known for playing tough bald cops and FBI agents and individuals of that nature. Back then he was skinnier, looked just like fuckin Ted Bundy which I bet is why they hired him. Opening scene he has just killed his family, and he calmly shaves his beard, changes his appearance. As he’s leaving, he puts away a couple of his daughter’s toys that are laying on the floor. A nice touch. Then walks past her bloody mutilated corpse. Strolls away whistling “Camptown Races.” This scene takes place in Bellevue which is exactly where this type of shit would happen, the rich people city east of Seattle, across the bridge.

Next thing you know he’s remarried, working real estate, making speeches to his neighbors about how he hopes he’s selling them more than a house, he’s selling them a lifestyle. He acts like a nice guy but his step-daughter knows what time it is. Actually, she doesn’t have any reason to suspect him at first, but because she hates seeing her mom with this fucker she catches on to him quick. So it catches that feeling of how people feel when their mom his a new boyfriend. But in this case they are completely right about the boyfriend.

This was 1987, there really were people like this, wanted all that Leave It to Beaver crap to be true. (In fact, they got a scene where he watches Mr. Ed and gets nostalgic for his childhood.) Alot of this ’50s sitcom family stuff was satirized to death right around this time, it became pretty cliche. But this is a good serious treatment of the stuff. It’s satire but it’s not at all a comedy. It’s not Serial Mom or something. But it’s there – the guy is killing his family when they “disappoint” him. He also kills a guy he thinks is on to him but you can tell what really gets his goat is when the guy claims to be “a confirmed bachelor” and talks shit about the idea of marriage and kids.

So in alot of ways unfortunately this movie is getting more relevant again today.

I think Westlake’s script is good but it’s Terry O’Quinn that’s gonna make or break the movie, and what he does is, the first one. He makes it. There’s one scene that’s actually pretty fuckin scary where the step-daughter gets sent to the cellar to grab some ice cream for the neighborhood picnic and sees O’Quinn flippin out, yellin gibberish to himself. Then he realizes she’s there and has to explain it, saying he’s a salesman, he has to smile all day, he needs to let things out sometimes. “You know how it is.” He seems so authentically nuts in the scene though, it’s pretty spectacular. Good one, Terry O’Quinn.

Director Joseph Ruben also did some movie called THE SISTER-IN-LAW about a fucked up sister-in-law. So the moral is, don’t marry into this guy’s family. You’re not welcome there.

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