Over the years I’ve dealt with criminals who have wanted to fight. But I have never had a knock-down drag-out fight like that night. Those Creech boys were small but they were determined. It dawned on me right then that they might be disadvantaged as criminals. It’s easy being a bad hombre when you’re as big as my friend Jack O’Bannon. It’s another to be a bad outlaw when your genes have shortened your stature. The Creeches hadn’t shied away from their outlaw ways. They relished it. Yet they had to be twice as tough and twice as mean to make it as criminals.
In my book, pound for pound, inch for inch, no criminal is as flat-out bad as the Clement County Creeches.
I’m here to tell you, them Creeches are the baddest outlaws alive.
Lisa Morton
What Ever Happened to Lorna Winters?
from Odd Partners
For some it’s the handshake at the end of the meeting. The smile at the restaurant table that tells you the answer is yes before you even ask. The email that makes you laugh. The sure knowledge — the kind that’s so sure you feel it in every fiber — that the person next to you will do something great, but only when they work with you.
For me it was that moment when I realized the blonde getting murdered in the old 16mm film was Lorna Winters. I knew then that those three minutes of black-and-white footage were going to become an important scene in the story of my life.
The battered old steel reel holding the nearly sixty-year-old footage arrived at my workstation the way most movies arrived there: in a box with other films and the accompanying paperwork.
I’d worked for BobsConversionMagic.com for two years and an odd number of days. When I’d taken the job, I’d been stupid enough to think it was a temporary fix for my unemployment problem. Since graduating with a film degree, I’d somehow failed to set Hollywood on fire. I’d tried all the usual approaches to getting a foot in the film industry door: I’d made two short films that I’d entered into festivals (the second one, Raw Material, had won a runner-up prize somewhere in Michigan), I’d written three feature screenplays that I kept in the trunk of my car at all times, I’d joined a writers’ group that gathered once a week for breakfast at a Westside eatery, but everyone I’d met had been other writers as desperate as I was. I wrote a blog on the history of film noir that had a few dozen followers but had yet to lead to anything else.
And I was flat broke. I was a terrible waiter, an even worse burger-flipper, and my car was so badly in need of a paint job that signing up for some driving app just seemed useless.
So the day my old college buddy Elliott called and said he could get me a film job, I jumped at the chance.
It turned out the “film job” was actually working for a place that converted old home movies into DVDs. And the company was in San Bernardino. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of leaving Hollywood behind for the Inland Empire, but I was even less thrilled at the thought of living on ramen and friends’ futons forever. The pay was decent, I figured apartments in that area would be cheaper than L.A., and maybe six months of transferring Uncle Harold’s old Christmas movies to digital would be enough to finance one more short film that I thought had a great script.
And two years later I was still pulling battered reels out of boxes and threading them through Bob’s old telecine.
Bob Zale, who owned the company, had turned out to be a damned decent boss to work for. He was a guy in his forties who, like me, had walked away from a Hollywood crash-and-burn, and, also like me, he loved old movies. My college bud Elliott may have left the company not long after setting me up there (he moved back home to South Dakota, where his parents’ basement beckoned to him with its siren song), but Bob and I bonded over many late-night beers and Robert Mitchum, Gloria Grahame, and Humphrey Bogart. We knew every bit player, the location of every rain-soaked street, the title of every forgotten gem.
Here’s how my days usually went: I’d arrive at work around 9 a.m. (Bob didn’t freak out if I was late, so long as I got through the day’s work). There’d be a few boxes of movies waiting for me; they’d already been received and checked in by Joanne, who ran both receiving and reception at Bob’s (we didn’t get much walk-in; most of the business came via the website). I’d pull out a reel, load it onto spindles on a flatbed, add a take-up reel, and crank through it by hand just to inspect the film. I could do basic fixes — repair splices, simple cleaning. Then, once I’d made notes about problem areas and solved what I could, the reel was loaded onto the telecine machine. Bob had two of them, both old Marconis that were probably far from the high-tech devices most customers imagine, especially if they’d watched Blu-ray supplements about digital remastering. We weren’t sitting in front of a bank of computer screens carefully watching a transfer to color-correct and paint out imperfections; instead I perched on a wobbly wooden stool peering into a screen the size of a paperback novel, just making sure the digitization was really happening.
That day’s first two transfers were typical stuff: faded footage of a backyard barbecue, and a family of wife and two girls horsing around on a deserted beach (Dad was presumably the cinematographer). In my two years working for Bob, I’d seen this stuff hundreds of times.
The next movie I threaded onto the machine from the same box was black-and-white. It seemed to be shot at night, on the back of a yacht. It opened on an empty deck surrounded by a low metal railing. In the background, light glimmered on moving water.
After a few seconds a woman entered the frame. Her back was to the camera, but she carried herself with such natural poise that I guessed she was beautiful before she turned. She walked to the edge, leaned on the railing, bent down to look into the water. Her long blond hair blew in the breeze caused by the boat’s cruising. She wore an elegant sleeveless black dress; it must have been a warm night, because her exposed shoulders didn’t huddle against any cold.
She turned to face the camera at last. It was a full shot, but even on the small telecine screen I could see I’d guessed right: she was beautiful.
I squinted and leaned in, trying to get a better look. Just then a man walked into the shot. The woman reacted with surprise — not the good kind — at seeing him. In fact, she backed toward the railing, her eyes narrowing.
It was that expression — the calculating coolness hiding the alarm — that confirmed who she was. It was one of her trademarks, a look that had made her one of film noir’s greatest icons.
She was Lorna Winters.
I nearly stopped the transfer in disbelief. Lorna Winters! I watched a few more seconds to be sure, but there was no doubt. Her tall, lean figure, the long blond hair with a few streaks of light brown, and that face... Lorna Winters, who had slapped Richard Conte in Rat Trap. Lorna Winters, who had raised male temperatures across the country when she’d flirted with Sterling Hayden in Bullet’s Kiss.
Lorna Winters, who’d made seven low-budget film noir gems, one last expensive studio production (Midnight Gun), and vanished without a trace in 1960.
I watched, breathless, as she argued with the man who’d entered the scene. He was a big man, wearing a suit with no tie. Lorna tried to walk around him, but he turned to block her, facing the camera. He had a classic thug’s face, heavy features, slicked-back dark hair, white scar over one eye.
I’d seen him before. There’d been one shot of Dad in the backyard barbecue movie. He’d grinned, lifted his long fork, waved it in a jaunty way when a little girl ran up to him.