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Life is strange. Allow me to elaborate.
The author Nathaniel West, a friend of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other luminaries of the word, died in a 1940 car crash when he blew through a California stop sign. He was 37. But before checking out, he wrote one of the great, if too often overlooked, classics of American literature:
The story is simple. The novel’s hero, Tod Hackett, is a gifted young Yale graduate; a painter with a love for the Great Masters. While planning his own masterpiece,
The Burning of Los Angeles, he ends up working as a set designer at a Hollywood studio. What he finds there, circling the dwarf star of Big Screen success like a planet of grasping egos, is a world of artifice, fame junkies, movie wannabes, failed dreams, and scamsters all slowly baking to a pleasant tan under alien palms and a technicolor sun. The results are boredom, frustration, and ultimately violence. Los Angeles, he discovers, was built on a desert, in more ways than one.
Written by: F.X. Maier
Directed by: Jack Hill
Switchblade Sisters is a film that is much better than it should be. On the surface, it’s just one in a long line of exploitation-era films about a gang of street-smart ladies. But it has far more heart and far more substance than a lot of the output of its era. And much of the credit for that goes to director Jack Hill (
Foxy Brown). Hill is well known for his contributions to the exploitation genre. But what makes his work stand out from the pack is the likability of the characters in his films.