Get to know "The Big Score" by Richard Sala

At their house, my parents want me to get rid of stuff I've left behind there and don't use anymore, like stacks of manila folders I stored inside their house's overhead cabinets. The folders contain press kits for albums like DJ Kool's Let Me Clear My Throat CD and movies like The Big Lebowski; old scripts of segment intros I typed up for the terrestrial radio version of AFOS; and newspaper/magazine article cutouts I enjoyed reading and had saved so that I could read them again someday (whatup, early 2000s Mercury News interview with De La Soul about the Art Official Intelligence "trilogy") or use one of them as the basis for some script for either TV, a film or a comic. For example, there was a folder from the early 2000s that I labeled "Jigsaw." It consisted of articles about crime in San Francisco I collected and saved as research for a San Francisco crime show idea I wanted to call Jigsaw (for a while, I wanted to create the Sucka Free equivalent of Homicide: Life on the Street and populate the cast with a few Asian American detectives).

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I was only able to empty one cabinet by throwing away a whole bunch of cutouts I don't need to save anymore--like the Jigsaw clippings (yeah, I don't think that show's ever going to get made). But there are some items from the folders in that cabinet that I don't want to dunk into the basura, so I've taken them along with me. They include a few issues of Scud: The Disposable Assassin I've held onto since college--one of those issues was written by a pre-Channel 101/Community Dan Harmon!--and a comic strip I snipped from a 1994 issue of Pulse! magazine.

Pulse! was a music review magazine the now-defunct Tower Records published and handed out for free in its stores. The final page of each Pulse! issue always featured a music-related comic strip. My favorite of those Pulse! strips is "The Big Score" by cartoonist Richard Sala, whose serialized 1991 "Invisible Hands" mystery shorts during Liquid Television were a favorite of many fans of the MTV animation anthology show. (Sala's horror comics are full of old-fashioned movie monsters and hot heroines. Cartoon Network is too dunderheaded to allow it, but I'd rather see the network's Adult Swim/Williams Street department produce a new Scooby-Doo animated series with character designs by either Sala or someone equally offbeat and not-so-kid-friendly instead of CN and Warner Bros. Animation rehashing the same old Scoob for kids.) "The Big Score" takes place in a noirish nightclub and cleverly replaces all the dialogue with names of classic crime movie scores that Sala thinks would be appropriate for each moment.

"At the time I was listening to a lot of movie soundtracks, particularly the cool, atmospheric soundtracks of thrillers and spy movies, which I found to be inspiring background music to play while I wrote," said Sala in a 2010 blog post about "The Big Score." I don't have a Mac-compatible scanner with me to digitally preserve "The Big Score," so good thing Sala--whose latest work is the digital-only Fantagraphics graphic novel Violenzia--scanned his own 1994 strip and posted it on his blog.

(Photo source: Richard Sala)

Thanks to YouTube and Spotify, I can now take that 1994 strip and post it alongside the exact same audio Sala envisioned when he drew it. Vertigo and Our Man Flint are the only film titles from "The Big Score" that contain themes that are currently in rotation on AFOS. I've streamed cues from Touch of Evil, The Ipcress File, Experiment in Terror, Arabesque and Psycho on AFOS before, and after first catching Kiss Me Deadly on TCM, it's hard to forget that batshit crazy Robert Aldrich flick, but I'm not familiar with the other movies Sala references in "The Big Score." I actually still haven't seen The Third Man. There are a couple of Ida Lupino flicks mentioned in there that I need to check out after hearing Greg Proops devote an entire segment to her work during The Smartest Man in the World.

Panel 1: Touch of Evil

Panel 2: The Ipcress File; The Third Man; Experiment in Terror; On Dangerous Ground

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Barry Adamson, "The Big Bamboozle"

Song: "The Big Bamboozle" by imaginary soundtrack producer Barry Adamson
Released: 1995
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: Adamson's "Big Bamboozle" crime-jazz instrumental is so seamy-sounding it would have been perfect as music during Kiss Me Deadly (a classic noir that, by the way, finally got the Criterion treatment on Blu-ray and DVD this summer).

I like "The Big Bamboozle" so much that when I edited together episodes of A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series, I frequently used it as an instrumental bed for segments where I spoke.

Sunset Gun: Better Know a Blogroll Link, Part 3

In addition to running the Sunset Gun film and music blog, Kim Morgan frequently contributes posts about film to The Huffington Post and MSN Movies. She was the "DVDuesday" reviewer on The Screen Savers before the program morphed into Attack of the Show (Film Threat's Chris Gore assumed the "DVDuesday" duties after her departure).

Hey Robert Osborne, hire Kim to be your next co-host on TCM's The Essentials. Unlike current Essentials co-host Rose McGowan, she won't annoy me with post-movie commentary about why Seven Samurai, a film recently featured on The Essentials, is inferior to the remake, The Magnificent Seven. McGowan's biggest gripe with Seven Samurai--one of my favorite films--is that it's overlong. WTF? For a film that's "too long," Seven Samurai is one of the least tedious ever made.

So McGowan prefers the good but not great Magnificent's sometimes stilted dialogue and direction (the filmmakers enlisted Elmer Bernstein to spruce up the film's rather lethargic pace, hence Bernstein's fantastic score) and its flat depictions of the peasant characters (they talk like the villager mice in Speedy Gonzales cartoons) over Samurai's more complex characterizations and more intense and mesmerizing action sequences? It's like if someone had to choose between The Wire and CSI: Miami to take along with them as a desert island disc box set and that person went with CSI: Miami. You lost me there, Cherry Darling.

Anyway, here are some of my favorite posts by Kim.

"Sexy Sleaze with Cheese--'70s Cop Shows on DVD":

The show's range in quality but they all reveal a mutual commonality--though a brilliant era for film and probably the last real sleazy FUN anyone had, the '70s were hard. Hard on people's faces. I don't know if it was the drugs, the clothes, the film stock, the lighting, the jaded post '60s malaise or the surge of swingin' Auto-Focus-esque divorced men, but everyone looks tough and sun-damaged. If you assume someone is 30, they're probably in real life, 20. And 40? Who the hell knows? In their polyester double knits, bad toupees, sweaty urine tinted undershirts, crinkled brows and hairy chests, everyone looks about 50. The '70s was a great time to be an unattractive character actor. You're fat, old and like to wear tight red pants? You've got the part!

"Sunset Gun's Ten Best Movies Of 2007":

This is the movie that the obnoxious, overrated, trying-way-too-hard Juno should have been. Smart teenagers not straining to be quirky and clever -- Jonah Hill and the great Michael Cera simply are clever. And smart. And not pulling quips out of some screen-written arsenal -- they're natural ("honest to blog" they are!). And the soul and funk soundtrack is an absolutely perfect celebration of teenage energy, sexuality and hope. I want to tongue kiss whoever decided to keep the movie devoid of any twee music. Seriously, I do. Preferably with a Curtis Mayfield song blasting.

"Kiss With a Bang--'Kiss Me Deadly'":

There are so many masterful opening shots, some I find works of genius or some I simply love. But the more I thought about it, the more I drifted back to where my mind always manages to drift back to — stark, hard-boiled cruelty, paranoia, insanity and psycho sexual angst — so there it was again, Kiss Me Deadly.

"Car Power":

Bullitt actually makes me think Mustangs are not the most obvious "muscle" car you can own. Still, the villain's car, the 1968 Dodge Charger was much, much cooler.

"One Brilliant Ball Of Fire":

All dolled up in pom-pom heels, creamy sweaters and dramatically lined lips, Stanwyck's Phyllis, who's not as young as she used to be and not quite as lush, can't hide the poison within her. And her chemistry with MacMurray sizzles as they swap barbs and coos (co-written by Raymond Chandler from a James M. Cain crime novella) with sleazy ease. They yearn for more, but Stanwyck, the prototypical noir siren, seems perfectly aware of how fatalistic this kind of dream really is. Sometimes murder really does smell like honeysuckle.

The best film writers do the following: they get you interested in films you're unfamiliar with, they make you see things that you never noticed before in past films you've watched, they leave their egos at the door and they manage to do it all with a sense of humor. The unpretentious and not-so-annoyingly-tweedy Kim Morgan is one such writer.