Rock Hudson was killing time waiting for that one big role to come along to change it all. He was making money, sure, lotsa money, he was box office mint but he was just doing the same damned thing over and over and over again. The hopes he once harbored after his performances in Giant or Written in the Wind or even The Spiral Road (a role he claimed to have studied the bejesus for) had all come to nought. Zip. Nada. No one was giving him a chance least of all his agent and long-time pal Henry Willson. 

Willson was doing sweetheart deals with the studios. A stash of cash under the table to get Hudson signed-up for another goddamn contract. Five more movies, sure, Rock would love to do them…where do ya want me to sign? Hudson was Wilson’s money-maker. He pimped him out to whoever had the most moolah. Wilson felt justified in his actions. He had been the one who’d picked up the six-foot-four beefcake when he was a long-streak of piss truck-driver fresh outta Winnetka. Willson pushed Hudson on the casting circuit and got him a deal when he still couldn’t get his lines right or even make an entrance without tripping over the props. Willson had also christened him Rock (after the Rock of Gibraltar) and Hudson (after the river) and made him into America’s number one heart-throb who made teenage girls swoon and their moms all dreamy-eyed. Wilson was taking what he thought was rightfully his—money. Which meant no big dramatic roles came Hudson’s way after Giant or The Spiral Road because there was no money and no interest there. All he got was rom-coms with thirty-something girl-next-door Doris Day or sexy swing-hips Gina Lollobrigida.

Hudson’s relationship with Willson was complex. It was a business partnership with benefits. Both men were gay and Wilson had the hots for Hudson and acted on it. To make matters more Freudian, the older Willson was also a father-figure to Hudson. A replacement for the father who had abandoned Rock when he was about three. Hudson always felt he was responsible for his father’s departure, which of course wasn’t true. Eventually, his mother remarried and his new stepdad was a drunk, a coward, and a bully who beat the shit outta Hudson just because he could.

Hudson was about nine-years-old at the time. He quickly learned how to hide his feelings, how to make his face a mask, and keep his thoughts to himself.

When Hudson grew like Topsy, he was able to hit back. That put paid to the ole drunk stepdad’s violence. In the same way when Hudson became a big movie star, he didn’t need Wilson no more. The roles he sought hadn’t materialised and he no longer wanted Willson signing his life away so he could line his pockets while Hudson did all the work. Hudson fired Willson. Now he was gonna make his own decisions.
 

 
Hudson decided on making a movie that would be so different, so far removed from his usual jokey isn’t-this-fun fare, that he hoped it would make audiences and producers appreciate his talents as an actor and not his hunky good looks. His decision turned out to be a kinda Pyrrhic victory. Hudson got the part he had always wanted but the movie bombed and killed-off his ambitions to ever try something like this again.

The movie was Seconds.

Based on a novella by (the vastly underrated) David Ely, Seconds tells the story of Antiochus Wilson (Arthur Hamilton in the film), a bored frustrated deadbeat middle-aged banker who feels his life is over until one day he is offered a second chance by a dark mysterious secret organization. For the right amount of money, this organization will give Wilson a new face, a new identity, a whole new life which he can keep so long as he plays by their rules.

Kirk Douglas had originally optioned the book thinking here was a sure-fire Best Actor Oscar if he played both the before and after roles of Hamilton/Wilson. Unfortunately, when the green light came, Douglas was busy making other plans. The rights were then bought by Paramount for their young director John Frankenheimer who’d earned his spurs and made the studio mega-bucks with a series of box hits—Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seven Days in May (1964), and The Train (1965). In Hollywood, you’re only as good as your last movie. Frankenheimer was yet to have a flop. This meant he could do what the hell he liked.

Frankenheimer thought the only actor who could play the before and after roles of Hamilton/Wilson was Laurence Olivier. He hopped on a plane to England and got the theatrical knight to agree to the role. But this wasn’t what Paramount wanted. They wanted a BIG NAME. A BIG BOX-OFFICE NAME that would bring as wide and as varied an audience to the movie as possible and therefore lotsa money. Through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, Rock Hudson was suggested as a possible lead to Frankenheimer.  The director couldn’t see it but agreed to meet with the actor.

Hudson wanted the part but he knew his limitations. He suggested to Frankenheimer that two actors should play the before and after roles rather than just one. It was a clever idea—one Frankenheimer thought would work. Hudson inferred he wanted the role because he knew exactly what it was like to be Hamilton/Wilson. Here was an actor who been forced to hide his true feelings since childhood and had had a whole new (fake) identity as America’s red-blooded hetero-beefcake foisted on him by movie studios. All so he could he have the one career he had always dreamed about.
 

 
More from Rock and ‘Seconds,’ after the jump…
 

1969 WITCH protest in front of Chicago Federal Building.
 
Of all the second wave feminists who exploded into action over the 1960s and 70s, no group seems to have had quite as much fun as WITCH—the fabulous acronym for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. Like so many other groups, WITCH was formed from a split, this one from New York Radical Women. Their counterpart, Redstockings, became the more famous “intellectual” feminist group, producing such visionary minds as Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone (who, among many other far out things, argued for the option of robotic wombs to liberate women from childbirth). WITCH on the other hand was the wild and wooly protest group, easily identifiable by their Halloween get-ups.
 

Protesting beauty pageant circa 1969.
 
The group specialized in disruption of the sensational bent, shrieking and chanting in black clothing and white face paint, and “throwing hexes” at enemies of the people. Among their many targets were beauty pageants, Wall Street, bridal fairs, Chase Bank, the presidential inauguration, and even sexists in the politically left anti-war movement. Some of the more famous work was actually quite modest in its goals (hey, all politics are local politics), including protesting public transportation fare hikes with this little hex:

Witches round the circle go
to hex the causes of our woe,
We the witches now conspire
To burn CTA in freedoms’ fire.

Bankers gall, politicians guile,
Daley’s jowl, lackey’s smile,
Trustee’s toe, bondholder’s liar
These we cast into our fire.

Meetings held, messages sealed
When the fare hike is revealed
We, the people, are the prey
Of the demon, CTA….

 
WITCH were one of many radical feminist groups of the second wave (1960s and 70s), and one of many that is sadly understudied and overlooked. Luckily women like director Mary Dore work on projects like She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, a new documentary that chronicles the feminist lay of the land in the days of the counterculture revolution. It’s baffling to think that explicitly socialist groups like WITCH and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union started out on the same footing as Hillary Clinton boosters like the National Organization for Women, but we all know that even in the feminist movement, the game is rigged towards Wellesley girls.
 

 
You can find a screening of She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry here, and I say it should be mandatory viewing for all girls under the age of eightteen. Where else are we going to get the next chapter of WITCH from?
 

 
Via Mother Jones

 
While the world mourns the death of that champion of misfits, John Hughes, we should also note the passing of On The Waterfront scribe, Budd Schulberg.  I say “note,” which should not at all be confused with “mourn.”  Schulberg did after all, under HUAC pressure, squeal on Bertolt Brecht, prompting the playwright’s unwanted return to Europe.  Shameful politics aside, though, Schulberg was responsible for such edgy-for-its-time fare as Ben Stiller’s pipe-dream project, What Makes Sammy Run, and the screenplay for A Face In The Crowd.  Of that film, which Slate‘s Troy Patterson calls “The Best Movie About Television You’ve Never Seen,”

Andy Griffith played Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a garrulous Arkansas hick who becomes a star of radio and television by laying on the down-home charm.  The Mayberry-type charisma curdles once he goes on up to New York City and becomes a demagogue, something of a hybrid of Will Rogers, Glenn Beck, and Sweet Smell of Success’ J.J. Hunsecker.

The above clip features one of Griffith’s more unhinged moments.  In it, Lonesome Larry shills, rockabilly-style, for “Vitajex,” a stimulant for men whose sole aim, it seems, is to “fill your gal with ‘oooh,’ and ecstasy!”
 
Slate: The Best Movie About Television You’ve Never Seen

Patrick Goldstein Sorts Out The Schulberg Legacy