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I came to, the police were there
For just about six minutes, Grand Jury Secrets (1939) plays like the exact transitional point between collegians and fall guys in the screen career of Elisha Cook Jr., which is a fun claim to fame even if pretty much everything else the picture has going for it is the gimmick with ham radio.
It is not even slightly a proto-noir; it's the kind of light crime melodrama where a breezily confident shortwave enthusiast of a news reporter gets himself in the doghouse with his brother the assistant district attorney for jeopardizing the secrecy of a grand jury with his wireless tricks and has to make good by employing them to solve the mystery that the proceedings have banged a hard right into with the murder of one of the partners in the high-class bucket-shop under investigation. Otherwise the kind of ethically optional slacker who advises a newsie on a slow night to gin up custom with shouts of "War declared!" without clarifying it's on slot machines, he's so eagerly dedicated to the journalistic possibilities of the unencrypted airwaves that one of his wearied colleagues complains, "Bright Eyes is right, Johnny. Ever since you turned Marconi on us, working here's become a job." His lawful stickler of a brother decries his experiments with suitcase radio as no better than wiretapping or old-fashioned lo-fi peeping and our gonif of a hero regards them as no worse and certainly more efficient than posing as a fecklessly wealthy investor or a priest to get a scoop. His tactless crush on his brother's fiancée doesn't make a real triangle, but his mother is educating her in the slang that flies around the house like call signs: "It stands for young lady in ham lingo." None of it insults the viewer except for the alacrity with which it kicks its questions of admissible surveillance under the carpet of its happy ending, but it falls toward the thinner rather than weirder end of B-movies to begin with and keeps goofing itself up with clock-watching when its plot would trot out as smartly as a pre-Code if the film just let it; instead it has so little sense of pacing that the crucial murder plot hangs fire until the third act, speedrunning the miscarriage of justice which the hero has to be jerked up short on averting rather than exploiting. The MacGuffin of the prime suspect didn't pull the trigger on the crooked broker who blackmailed his father to the point of suicide, but on account of the actor behind the serious small-town youth who suddenly hauled out a gun and got cold-cocked before he could use it—waking, in a touch of personal noir that his film is too essentially straight to capitalize on, to be told that his inadvertent wild shot was fatal after all—while audiences of 1939 may have trusted to his innocence to save him from a first-degree rap, audiences any time after 1941 would bet the other way.
Just the thumbnail of this character suffices for the argument: Norman Hazlitt, doggedly claiming to have nothing to say to the authorities looming over him, clinging staunchly to a transparent alias even when the initials in his hat make him out a liar, so tight-lipped in protecting his parents from further scandal that he's taken for a hitman instead of a half-cocked kid, really looks like the missing link between the juveniles that Cook came off Broadway playing and his immortally luckless run as Hollywood's lightest heavy. "He's fronting for somebody, that's certain." Minus the wire-rimmed nebbishkeit of his student parts, he has a very young gravity facing off against his father's tormentor and his sudden fate, still learning to shiver; his flare of bravado under interrogation is as recognizable as the overstrained tremor in his voice as the gun whips out, but he isn't as high-keyed as some of the pigeons who'll follow him, even when he folds over in his cell in tears with the stupidity, the unfairness, and the bewilderment of the truth. "I didn't go there to kill him, Father. I only wanted to talk to him. I wanted to try to frighten him into letting Dad alone. He wouldn't listen to me . . . I had to tell it to somebody. I had to tell it to somebody or go crazy." He turns up his face defiantly, earnestly disbelieved; his actor will become more expressive with his hands, but even here they pick nervously over the brim of his hat until it's snatched away from him with the flourish of a courtroom gotcha and he can already hang his head as hopelessly as nobody's business. Even without his hair tousled from his crying jag, it's not hard to understand how Cook could have played adolescents into his thirties, emotionally all cluttered too close beneath the surface no matter the lines of familiar anxiety already starting to ruck into it. He looks even younger for the care with which he takes the little saint's medal from around his neck and entrusts it to the supposed priest, unselfconsciously tear-smeared for a gesture of bathos that he means with all his heart: "After it's all over, will you please give that to my mother?" I can't find that anyone noticed at the time, but now it pops like one of his signature shock-wide stares. Railroaded Norman is a device for the reporter to rebound his moral event horizon off of and he feels like the only real person in Grand Jury Secrets.
The ground zero for Cook's CV of fall guys looks like the brutally framed bellhop of Albert Maltz and George Sklar's Merry-Go-Round (1932), one of the short-lived plays for which the actor nonetheless garnered good notices before his breakout with Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! (1933). Its plot as soon as I read about it seemed so stereotypically the sort of thing that would happen to an Elisha Cook Jr. character that I wondered if it had been in someone's memory when he was cast in the small, pivotal, wrongfully convicted part in Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), for whose early, expressionist noir his force ten commitment to victimization could have been tailor-made. Checking to make sure of a clear line of sight between the two productions, I tripped instead over Grand Jury Secrets—it seemed too convenient for the falsely accused young man left unnamed by the AFI Catalog to have been played by Cook, but by the power of the studio system which loved its easily slotted types, here we are. His pre-noir filmography had its share of jockeys and eggheads, too, but the thread of the shlimazl was the one that caught. In strict fairness, one could identify this quality as far back as his first real year in film with the four-eyed campus radical of Pigskin Parade (1936) who gets catchily decoyed into an arrest so that his academic credentials can be appropriated by a football hero, but the stakes are broad comedy and the excitable little agitator exits triumphantly convinced he's struck a blow for the youth of America. Norman Hazlitt is in real danger and even when the heel face detecting of the hero guarantees his exoneration of the crime he made such a sweet scapegoat for, the film runs out so fast, we don't actually see it: our last shot of him is that resigned, forlorn kid on his jailhouse bunk, not even knowing he just gave away an exclusive story with that valiant medal. In a movie which finds time it can't spare for a goonily pummeling hangover cure and the perpetual perplexity of the hero's picture-snatcher sidekick, a reassuring line of dialogue would have been nice and all but out of the question for an Elisha Cook Jr. character going forward. That he got to repeat his stage success in neither the film of Merry-Go-Round (1932) nor of Ah, Wilderness! (1935) just feels meta-insulting.
For the record, the gimmick with ham radio is so good that it deserves a more thoughtful movie, since it depends on the strikingly cellular conceit of the hero having rigged out his roadster for broadcast and reception such that he can use it to walkie-talkie home when late for supper: "W6PCV portable-mobile testing . . . Mom, our traffic's kind of thick, so keep the soup hot. And it better be clam chowder!" Thus when he whistles his heading in Morse code with a murderer's gun in his ribs, it can be picked up by other hams who heroically organize their own dragnet to locate and rescue him while the love interest who always did have her head screwed on straighter than either of the men in her life channels the case-breaking conversation straight to the grand jury by interrupting their deliberations with a receiver which the foreman who is fortunately a bit of a gearhead himself knows how to get working, OTR séance-style. "We'll make an aerial. Everybody join hands now." It is the cleverest thing in the picture, technologically comparable to the recursive use of television in Dial 1119 (1950), and if the surrounding action were at all thematically plugged into it, it could get within hailing distance of sociological sf. Instead it's a sort of Motorola garnish on a moral lesson and does as much to distinguish it as Elisha Cook Jr., which is to say that neither of them can bail this movie out of its formula, but it would have been worth giving both of them more screen time just to see.
If you want the technical specs on Grand Jury Secrets, it runs the 67 minutes of a decidedly second feature for Paramount and was directed by James Hogan from a screenplay by Irving Reis and Robert Yost, original story by Reis and Maxwell Shane who as a writer and director would specialize in noir once it existed; its sets share the scrimped look of its runtime, but its DP was Harry Fischbeck who makes the shine of vacuum tubes count as much as the shadows. After Cook, the strongest characterizations go to Gail Patrick as the level-headed love interest and Jane Darwell as the CQ-conversant mother, since the women of this film are not slammed as far to the corners of the moral alignment chart as the oppositional brothers played by John Howard and Harvey Stephens, while William Frawley, Porter Hall, and Morgan Conway all hit their comical or villainous marks and Tom Dugan steals fifty seconds as a waiter who correctly diagnoses that the big-talking reporter has never ordered champagne before in his life. "It tastes like spoiled cider!" There are cute touches throughout the script, such as the sign in the press room which has been hand-edited to read "If a Man Bites a DogIt's News It's His Own Fault," and then at a moment of sincere callout it commits the blenderized metaphor, "The world's your oyster and you're going to milk it dry." I had never before seen the technique of paging an audience member during a movie by sliding a subtitle across the screen, nor had I realized that Depression-era cars could sport the precursors to bumper stickers. Mostly I had not known about Elisha Cook Jr. in this film and it makes me happier to have found him, even in a truly sketchy format. Hindsight makes a joke of the headlines shouted in the extra-extra montage after the murder: "Mystery Youth Slays Broker . . . Boy Killer Hides Identity." He might be the most recognizable face in it now. This front brought to you by my certain backers at Patreon.
It is not even slightly a proto-noir; it's the kind of light crime melodrama where a breezily confident shortwave enthusiast of a news reporter gets himself in the doghouse with his brother the assistant district attorney for jeopardizing the secrecy of a grand jury with his wireless tricks and has to make good by employing them to solve the mystery that the proceedings have banged a hard right into with the murder of one of the partners in the high-class bucket-shop under investigation. Otherwise the kind of ethically optional slacker who advises a newsie on a slow night to gin up custom with shouts of "War declared!" without clarifying it's on slot machines, he's so eagerly dedicated to the journalistic possibilities of the unencrypted airwaves that one of his wearied colleagues complains, "Bright Eyes is right, Johnny. Ever since you turned Marconi on us, working here's become a job." His lawful stickler of a brother decries his experiments with suitcase radio as no better than wiretapping or old-fashioned lo-fi peeping and our gonif of a hero regards them as no worse and certainly more efficient than posing as a fecklessly wealthy investor or a priest to get a scoop. His tactless crush on his brother's fiancée doesn't make a real triangle, but his mother is educating her in the slang that flies around the house like call signs: "It stands for young lady in ham lingo." None of it insults the viewer except for the alacrity with which it kicks its questions of admissible surveillance under the carpet of its happy ending, but it falls toward the thinner rather than weirder end of B-movies to begin with and keeps goofing itself up with clock-watching when its plot would trot out as smartly as a pre-Code if the film just let it; instead it has so little sense of pacing that the crucial murder plot hangs fire until the third act, speedrunning the miscarriage of justice which the hero has to be jerked up short on averting rather than exploiting. The MacGuffin of the prime suspect didn't pull the trigger on the crooked broker who blackmailed his father to the point of suicide, but on account of the actor behind the serious small-town youth who suddenly hauled out a gun and got cold-cocked before he could use it—waking, in a touch of personal noir that his film is too essentially straight to capitalize on, to be told that his inadvertent wild shot was fatal after all—while audiences of 1939 may have trusted to his innocence to save him from a first-degree rap, audiences any time after 1941 would bet the other way.
Just the thumbnail of this character suffices for the argument: Norman Hazlitt, doggedly claiming to have nothing to say to the authorities looming over him, clinging staunchly to a transparent alias even when the initials in his hat make him out a liar, so tight-lipped in protecting his parents from further scandal that he's taken for a hitman instead of a half-cocked kid, really looks like the missing link between the juveniles that Cook came off Broadway playing and his immortally luckless run as Hollywood's lightest heavy. "He's fronting for somebody, that's certain." Minus the wire-rimmed nebbishkeit of his student parts, he has a very young gravity facing off against his father's tormentor and his sudden fate, still learning to shiver; his flare of bravado under interrogation is as recognizable as the overstrained tremor in his voice as the gun whips out, but he isn't as high-keyed as some of the pigeons who'll follow him, even when he folds over in his cell in tears with the stupidity, the unfairness, and the bewilderment of the truth. "I didn't go there to kill him, Father. I only wanted to talk to him. I wanted to try to frighten him into letting Dad alone. He wouldn't listen to me . . . I had to tell it to somebody. I had to tell it to somebody or go crazy." He turns up his face defiantly, earnestly disbelieved; his actor will become more expressive with his hands, but even here they pick nervously over the brim of his hat until it's snatched away from him with the flourish of a courtroom gotcha and he can already hang his head as hopelessly as nobody's business. Even without his hair tousled from his crying jag, it's not hard to understand how Cook could have played adolescents into his thirties, emotionally all cluttered too close beneath the surface no matter the lines of familiar anxiety already starting to ruck into it. He looks even younger for the care with which he takes the little saint's medal from around his neck and entrusts it to the supposed priest, unselfconsciously tear-smeared for a gesture of bathos that he means with all his heart: "After it's all over, will you please give that to my mother?" I can't find that anyone noticed at the time, but now it pops like one of his signature shock-wide stares. Railroaded Norman is a device for the reporter to rebound his moral event horizon off of and he feels like the only real person in Grand Jury Secrets.
The ground zero for Cook's CV of fall guys looks like the brutally framed bellhop of Albert Maltz and George Sklar's Merry-Go-Round (1932), one of the short-lived plays for which the actor nonetheless garnered good notices before his breakout with Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! (1933). Its plot as soon as I read about it seemed so stereotypically the sort of thing that would happen to an Elisha Cook Jr. character that I wondered if it had been in someone's memory when he was cast in the small, pivotal, wrongfully convicted part in Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), for whose early, expressionist noir his force ten commitment to victimization could have been tailor-made. Checking to make sure of a clear line of sight between the two productions, I tripped instead over Grand Jury Secrets—it seemed too convenient for the falsely accused young man left unnamed by the AFI Catalog to have been played by Cook, but by the power of the studio system which loved its easily slotted types, here we are. His pre-noir filmography had its share of jockeys and eggheads, too, but the thread of the shlimazl was the one that caught. In strict fairness, one could identify this quality as far back as his first real year in film with the four-eyed campus radical of Pigskin Parade (1936) who gets catchily decoyed into an arrest so that his academic credentials can be appropriated by a football hero, but the stakes are broad comedy and the excitable little agitator exits triumphantly convinced he's struck a blow for the youth of America. Norman Hazlitt is in real danger and even when the heel face detecting of the hero guarantees his exoneration of the crime he made such a sweet scapegoat for, the film runs out so fast, we don't actually see it: our last shot of him is that resigned, forlorn kid on his jailhouse bunk, not even knowing he just gave away an exclusive story with that valiant medal. In a movie which finds time it can't spare for a goonily pummeling hangover cure and the perpetual perplexity of the hero's picture-snatcher sidekick, a reassuring line of dialogue would have been nice and all but out of the question for an Elisha Cook Jr. character going forward. That he got to repeat his stage success in neither the film of Merry-Go-Round (1932) nor of Ah, Wilderness! (1935) just feels meta-insulting.
For the record, the gimmick with ham radio is so good that it deserves a more thoughtful movie, since it depends on the strikingly cellular conceit of the hero having rigged out his roadster for broadcast and reception such that he can use it to walkie-talkie home when late for supper: "W6PCV portable-mobile testing . . . Mom, our traffic's kind of thick, so keep the soup hot. And it better be clam chowder!" Thus when he whistles his heading in Morse code with a murderer's gun in his ribs, it can be picked up by other hams who heroically organize their own dragnet to locate and rescue him while the love interest who always did have her head screwed on straighter than either of the men in her life channels the case-breaking conversation straight to the grand jury by interrupting their deliberations with a receiver which the foreman who is fortunately a bit of a gearhead himself knows how to get working, OTR séance-style. "We'll make an aerial. Everybody join hands now." It is the cleverest thing in the picture, technologically comparable to the recursive use of television in Dial 1119 (1950), and if the surrounding action were at all thematically plugged into it, it could get within hailing distance of sociological sf. Instead it's a sort of Motorola garnish on a moral lesson and does as much to distinguish it as Elisha Cook Jr., which is to say that neither of them can bail this movie out of its formula, but it would have been worth giving both of them more screen time just to see.
If you want the technical specs on Grand Jury Secrets, it runs the 67 minutes of a decidedly second feature for Paramount and was directed by James Hogan from a screenplay by Irving Reis and Robert Yost, original story by Reis and Maxwell Shane who as a writer and director would specialize in noir once it existed; its sets share the scrimped look of its runtime, but its DP was Harry Fischbeck who makes the shine of vacuum tubes count as much as the shadows. After Cook, the strongest characterizations go to Gail Patrick as the level-headed love interest and Jane Darwell as the CQ-conversant mother, since the women of this film are not slammed as far to the corners of the moral alignment chart as the oppositional brothers played by John Howard and Harvey Stephens, while William Frawley, Porter Hall, and Morgan Conway all hit their comical or villainous marks and Tom Dugan steals fifty seconds as a waiter who correctly diagnoses that the big-talking reporter has never ordered champagne before in his life. "It tastes like spoiled cider!" There are cute touches throughout the script, such as the sign in the press room which has been hand-edited to read "If a Man Bites a Dog
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It's like book yelling with a time dimension!
*hugs*
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Am I correct that there's never been a book-length biography of Cook? Because I sure would like to read one.
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Thank you so much! I wish TCM would run it instead of whatever they are doing for their days of Oscar.
(I really wish I could have seen him in Ah, Wilderness!)
Absolutely a time machine credit. I can't believe he was replaced in both film transfers by Eric Linden. And I even like Eric Linden!
Am I correct that there's never been a book-length biography of Cook? Because I sure would like to read one.
I've never heard of one and same!
[edit] The most information I have ever seen about Cook in the same place is not a critical piece, but a lengthy profile which ran in New West in 1980; it is not officially available on the Internet Archive, but much of it can be read thanks to the search function and if it's reasonably accurate, he did have a neat as well as an artistically interesting life. He had a clear fund of stories in that I have seen three variations now on the one about Submarine Patrol (1938) and his thumb, but I had never heard the one his wife tells where they busted up after twenty-five years of marriage, never actually moved out of the same house, and eventually remarried, like real-life screwball, or the one he tells about walking out on a contract dispute and not working in films for a year and a half, which even allowing for artistic license does match a gap in his filmography. I don't know why there's never been a biography. It's not like people don't post about him every Noirvember, or randomly throughout the year.
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ETA: Tin Pan Alley! The title in Spanish is so different that I had to give up and look it up!
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Thank you!
His career has so many interesting periods, and I haven't heard of this movie, but I look forward to it now, to see this transitional point.
I had no idea it existed until a couple of nights ago and I couldn't find almost any information about it once I did! It really made me want the time machine for his stage work.
I think the earliest I've seen him is that musical with Betty Grable, the name of which escapes me right now... I think it's the heat!
Sympathies! Last night we had sheet ice.
I have seen him in Two in a Crowd (1936) and Pigskin Parade (1936), both of which are from his first steady year in film. I desperately want to know if Her Unborn Child (1930) survives or whether it's one of the maddeningly lost pre-Codes because it's the earliest he appeared on film full stop. I am not at all sure how good it was from reviews of the time, but it furnished production stills like this one.
ETA: Tin Pan Alley! The title in Spanish is so different that I had to give up and look it up!
I've never seen that one! I've only seen Betty Grable and Elisha Cook Jr. together in I Wake Up Screaming! What is it called in Spanish?
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I'm at the unwise point where I'd take potentially dangerous slippery ice over definitely harmful extreme heat! :'(
I desperately want to know if Her Unborn Child (1930) survives or whether it's one of the maddeningly lost pre-Codes because it's the earliest he appeared on film full stop. I am not at all sure how good it was from reviews of the time, but it furnished production stills like this one.
OMG that photo! I hope it pops up somewhere eventually! Meanwhile, I found this at the LoC!
I've never seen that one! I've only seen Betty Grable and Elisha Cook Jr. together in I Wake Up Screaming! What is it called in Spanish?
I've seen that one too! And it also has a really different title in Spanish (¿Quién mató a Vicky?), but I find it easier to remember because of the remake. Tin Pan Alley is called "Dímelo cantando".
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Take our sheet ice, please!
(I love winter, but one of the front steps has become a frictionless slab and I do not love it.)
OMG that photo! I hope it pops up somewhere eventually! Meanwhile, I found this at the LoC!
Is that the entire script—the dialogue at least? That's brilliant! I went looking for contemporary reviews, of which I found several. It sounds pretty polemic, but fingers crossed that at least one of those nine-reel copies survived. Rediscoveries premiere at film festivals all the time and I would like to see Elisha Cook Jr. eating donuts.
(Stewart Kennedy in Her Unborn Child looks like the only one of his stage roles he got to recreate onscreen. His scene partner transferred with him, although not for whatever reason the rest of the 1928 Broadway cast. He was also in the 1932 Broadway production of Chrysalis from which nobody transferred to the pre-Code All of Me (1934), but that one seems to have been a trainwreck whichever way.)
Tin Pan Alley is called "Dímelo cantando".
I can see why you had to look that one up! ¿Quién mató a Vicky? at least reminds you of the plot!
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Rediscoveries premiere at film festivals all the time and I would like to see Elisha Cook Jr. eating donuts.
Polemic or not, it's so interesting to see those reviews even if we can't watch the movie! But fingers crossed it will be eventually rediscovered!!
I can see why you had to look that one up! ¿Quién mató a Vicky? at least reminds you of the plot!
Exactly! XD
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he can already hang his head as hopelessly as nobody's business
and
his force ten commitment to victimization
simultaneously had me giggling and feeling like I really had a bead on the character. The giggling turned into actual laughing at the thought of milking an oyster dry, gotta say.
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Thank you!
One of the things I have found fascinating about wading through as much of Elisha Cook Jr.'s stage career as I can track down at the remove of the Internet Broadway Database, the Internet Archive, and generally snippet view on Google Books is the proof of his range, since he racked up consistently strong reviews in comedies, tragedies, melodramas, flops. He obviously had specialties and I am beginning to think that in some ways he fused them in his screen persona, although I want more information before I try to propose a grand unified theory. But I was really intrigued by this bit from a profile of young actors in The Stage in 1933:
"Elisha Cook, Jr., is an all-around. Put him, against his will, into a tragic part, and he will make your spine quiver whenever necessary. Give him comedy and he will have a grand time, and perhaps not try so hard to do his best. The observant knew about his talent many months ago when he was with Ethel Barrymore in The Kingdom of God, and when he did an earnest and dismal thing called Lost Boy. When he was the framed bellhop in Merry-Go-Round last season, and the youthful gangster in Chrysalis last fall, there was no longer any doubt about his ability. Just now he is having a holiday in Three-Cornered Moon."
And then he would draw raves for Ah, Wilderness! He is really not remembered for his comedy on film, partly because there's much less of it, unless you count the sad clown quality of so many of his noir and post-noir characters being small-time, in over their heads, doomed to an existentially ludicrous degree. The idea that it was his natural bent on stage, if accurate, feels important.
The giggling turned into actual laughing at the thought of milking an oyster dry, gotta say.
I am not getting over that line any time soon. Additionally it made me want the stew my grandmother used to make by simmering oysters in milk with butter and pepper, which I do not believe was at all the intended effect.
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When you find things about someone like Elisha Cook Jr. on all these disparate internet locations, do you download and save the sources? Just thinking about the fragility of the internet these days.
mmmmmmmm oyster stew .....
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I tracked down some contemporary reviews and it sounds in fact like super-downbeat social message theater in which Elisha Cook Jr. gave a performance instead of a case study and good for him. He really was a new face of Broadway. Both Brooks Atkinson who was the tastemaker of the New York Times and Robert Benchley who snarked chronically in the pages of The New Yorker consistently liked him. And if he had stayed on Broadway I might not even have known enough about him to complain about not being able to see him, but under the circumstances I really want that time machine.
When you find things about someone like Elisha Cook Jr. on all these disparate internet locations, do you download and save the sources? Just thinking about the fragility of the internet these days.
I haven't been doing it systematically, but I actually have been saving some articles. I'm not sure it's accumulating toward anything other than files of random interest, but I keep losing access to movies and texts at least can be stored. I also worry about the future of archives.
mmmmmmmm oyster stew .....
Right? An ideal winter food.