JAM [posting under KM's account due to laptop cookie problems said:
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BTW, Larry Nevel told me that when he is on the road, he likes to listen to book CD's to pass the time during those long, long trips to pool events.
It would be awesome if it was a audio CD. It is a text file on CD from what I am gathering though. So you load up word or some program and open the file on the CD rom and poof, there is your book as text. Still, its for a good cause, there are alot of stories I imagine also about lost times in pool, so I bought one.
The free chapter alone is worth a read, it gives us a glimpse into the life of a legend in the game. Something I had no clue about and it makes the history of the game that much more sweet. The scene in that chapter would be such a sweet sad type of scene in a movie, someone ought to be writing a movie script about pool that is not so much action and rehersed as CoM, something more raw and real like that chapter looks at. Pool is a sport that has alot of bitter sweet era's and people.
I always thought following the life of a single pool player through the game from 1920 or so to the present would be awesome. Similar to McGoorty's book where it takes place as a whole flashback on the life of the guy. Start the movie in some dingy crappy pool hall with some ancient 90-100 year old man sitting at the bar of a pool hall watching some meaningless match between two hacks. Somehow he gets into flashback mode, not telling the story to anyone, just sits there and something familiar stirs daydreams about the good ole days. So we get to see the guys life as a young kid skipping school and sneaking into the pool hall, through to getting decent at the game, seeing the pro's, doing the road, making friends, losing friends, seeing great REAL hustles, none of that fakey crap we got in COM or even the Hustler, getting chased out of town, ect... The whole story about Lassiter if put on film in a movie like that would be gut wrenching, especially if at the end of that scene it told the audience that "soandso" years/months/days later he was dead and then went on with the story on towards the resent day of the last old timer all alone sitting in his modern divebomb pool hall with it's video games pinging in the background, the bartender and other people running the hall not knowing the first thing about poo, and young punks with $300 cues playing $2 a game 9-ball and trash talking and strutting like kings.
There is an awesome movie out there to be made. A script that is just waiting to be wrote by one of you old timers who have the stories and the past to know some great things. Just make it real. Somehow no movie got the scene and the hardships right. Pool Hall Junkies was such crap, the scene is not like that. Sure, there is drugs, there is alchohol, there is gambling, there is violence, all that exists in pool but not the way PHJ made it out, not even close. The current idea of a pool movie where "Mafioso Joe is a backer for pool matches, oh noes! my brother just lost 10 grand on him and now he owes him! I better save him in the climax pool match against the hustler that beat him!" is so bloody retarded.
The scene in McGoorty where Greenleaf hits the washroom after chopping it up hard in a opening shot in a huge match and there McGoorty witnesses he blow down a whole lotta booze, get loaded, and then casually saunter out and shoot flawlessly on the table is awesome REAL pool issues that exist and have existed, it is a rich part of our history in the game. That scene would be similar to the scene in Leaving Las Vegas when Nic Cage cannot sign a check due to his hands not being steady enough, he goes to the bar, pounds afew drinks, comes back and signs it with ease. That is tragic, and tradgedy exists in bounds in pool, as is evident through Lassiter's life as well.
The best pool movie yet to be made, it is a cross between Once Upon a Time in America, in that you follow the life of the main character through the years and various stages of his life, the book McGoorty, where you meet the player at the end of that life looking back and being saddend by what has become of the game he spent his life as a part of.
If I had the stories and the experience I would write teh damn thing myself. I am 28 years old though, I cannot write this, we need a old fogey.
