A neighborhood movie theater comes down — childhood memories are destroyed.
The big monkey's biplane in the park is an icon from King Kong. It's also an homage to Richard Rush (The Stuntman) whose love of flying is matched only by his love of the movies.
Keno's line "When Harry was a kid, he flipped a coin — heads he'd win, tails, he'd lose..." paraphrases John Garfield's dialogue in an early Warner Bros. flick. Director Stan Dragoti was fond of quoting it and adding his own tag "...It wasn't his fault it fell in a crack." It all made perfect sense on the set of Dragoti's first film, Dirty Little Billy.
Blume's "halfling" Quinlan is an inside-out reference to Orson Welles' immense Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil. Even half a Welles is too big a monkey to carry on any filmmaker's back. Nonetheless, the wharf and the bodies of Mexican midgets are tributes to his noir masterpiece.
The one-eyed building inspector with a wooden leg refers to unfortunate circumstances endured by many at the hands of corrupt zoning officials.
Luis Delgado and the two hookers were born out of a drunken night spent on Olvera Street in the company of an Hispanic character actor who shall remain nameless.
"Where the hell was Malibu?" is just another way of saying L.A. is built largely on principles that endorse a loss of continuity.
Roxie is named in honor of the director's very kind and understanding mother-in-law.
Blume is everything covert rolled into one brown fedora.
The little green monkey in Keno's drink at the Voodoo Lounge is a symbol on the Chinese calendar.
Hedda is pure fantasy.
Notes from the director regarding the peculiar ethnic mix in HARRY MONUMENT:
Just once in my life I wanted to get it all wrong like they did in the Saturday afternoon movies of my youth. Seduced by serials from Monogram, Mascot, and Columbia Pictures (BATMAN before stretch fabric -- elbows and knees blown out by Chapter Three) I ran with heroes whose hats never came off even while they jumped, parachuted, galloped and chased after villains in cars that changed models in mid-pursuit (usually while going over cardboard cliffs) before entering the secret cave of the Evil Masked Ham, a short-wave radio-operating Japanese spy (usually played by J. Carroll Naish) who ran a pet shop in Pleasantville (usually played by South Pasadena.) A lifetime later and still on the edge of my seat, I came up with the beginnings of this movie. As the plot swam along in a slightly fishy faux noir style, it lost its hazy, smudge pot, California orange grove innocence of the '40s and became an anachronistic memory-monster wandering through a dimly-lit, illusory city, bent on the very serious business of chasing its own celluloid tail.
Richard Evans |
