I'm still not used to the fact that it can snow in April where I live. It wasn't a lot of snow, but it did in fact snow this week for part of an afternoon. Wild.
A Thing In My Possession: A Triangle Deck of Cards I really like the "triangle deck" of James Ernest's Pairs. It's called that, not because of the shape of the individual cards (They're rectangles, as usual) but because of the distribution of cards in the deck. It has ten cards, nine 9s, eight 8s, etc. It's a clever structure and dozens of games have been made with it. Pairs, the base game is a simple push you luck game, where on your turn you take a new card or pass and take the lowest card on the table. Because you know how many of each rank are in the deck, you feel much safer taking a a new card when all you have is a three, but if you have an 8 and a 9 in front of you taking another card becomes much riskier. If you end up with a Pair of the same rank you get points for the value of the rank. Points are bad and you keep laying until someone hits a predetermined number of points. That person wins and everyone else loses.
I've been thinking about other games you can play with this deck, and I landed on Cockroach Poker. Cockroach Poker is a light bluffing game, where you have knowledge of the cards in your hand, and other people try to pass you cards and can lie about what they're giving you. The core moment in the game is deciding if you want to call out if you think the person is lying or telling the truth, or instead Pass the card on to someone else. If you guess wrong about the person lying, you take the card and put it in front of you. If you guess right, the person who gave you the card takes it instead. But the deck has an even number of each type of card. If you sub in the triangle deck, you then have additional knowledge that there are a lot more of certain types of cards and very few of others. This adds a delicious frosting of additional imperfect knowledge to the an already wonderful game. Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Dick Miller Dick Miller. He’s a guy. You might see him in a movie and go “Hey it’s that guy!” Dick Miller is so much a “That guy” in movies, that there’s a documentary about him called ‘That Guy Dick Miller.” A month or so ago I watched Chopping Mall, a 1980s movie about a group of horny teens trapped in a shopping mall overnight with killer robots. It’s exactly the movie you expect it to be, good or bad. But about 20 minutes in, Dick Miller showed up as a Janitor with just a couple lines. I was so excited, I said “Hey, it’s Dick Miller!” to nobody in particular.
I got to thinking about how many movies That Guy Dick Miller must have been in, and it turns out, a lot! I thought it would be a fun ongoing project to see as many of the 139 movies he has been in. I made a list on Letterboxed called Phallus Molendinum (faux latin for Dick Miller) and got to work watching movies and listing them there as I watched. when I got the urge I would pull up the list of all 139 movies he had been in on Letterboxd and sort and filter them until I found one I wanted to check out. I’ve generally been leaning towards his earliest or least popular works (least popular is a metric that Letterboxd creates, but doesn’t explain exactly what goes into it) as I figure If I start with the more obscure stuff I might find some hidden gems on the way to the more well known movies he has been in.
Notice how I mentioned 139 movies a couple of times up there? I’ve been looking at the list enough that the number stuck in my brain. So imagine my surprise when I opened the list this week and noticed that it had ticked up by one. Letterboxd now listed 140 movies in the Dick Miller oeuvre. I was pretty sure he hadn’t been in anything new since he died back in 2019, so I started sorting the list to see if anything stuck out. I was worried that I would have to carefully search each of the movies to see what changed, but I got lucky, because the newly added movie was literally the first on the list when sorted by release date (Old->new.)
Dick Miller, more than once, told the story of how he got started as an actor. He moved to Hollywood to be a writer, but while he was waiting for that to take off, he found his way onto a movie set where Roger Corman was working, and Corman hired him as an actor. His first role was on a low budget western called Apache Woman. He played an Apache, because it was 1955 and nobody thought that was a bad idea. This has been confirmed by Roger Corman and others. And you can find the movie and watch it too. I did.
But now his first listed movie was something called Intermediate Landing in Paris. I’ve never heard of it, but that’s not unusual for me to never heard of a movie. But what was weird is this movie is a French/German collaboration from 1955 that is so obscure that only 5 people have logged having seen it on Letterboxd, and all of those logs are from more than 3 years ago. The IMDB has a single review from someone who watched it. And that review is from 2009. This isn’t Roger Corman Obscure, it’s a whole other level. If Dick Miller was in a French/German co-production as his first film, don’t you think someone would have mentioned it before now? I think so.
So I think something is up. I know that Letterboxd pulls data from The Movie Database (instead of IMDB) so I go there. TMDB is a much easier to edit site, and people can make changes pretty much any time they want, with no oversight. But there’s an edit log so I can find that someone added Dick Miller to the cast list just a few weeks ago, along with some other people. Was someone trying to rewrite history? Or was someone just doing their best to accurately reflect what they thought was the truth?
I needed to find out. My gut said there was no way Dick Miller was in the movie. But can you track down an obscure film from 1955 that never even had a physical media release in the US? The internet can. I started posting about this mystery on my mastodon account and after a day or so, one of my internet friends found a streaming copy of the German language version. I didn’t care about the language, since I was looking at faces instead. My first stop: The opening credits. To my surprise there is someone named Richard Miller listed in the cast! Was I wrong? Was this actually a movie we can add to the Dick Miller canon? Was he actually in a movie that came out before his commonly accepted first movie role? Did he actually fly to another country after moving to Hollywood in 1952, but before he got his “first” acting gig with Roger Corman? I was going to find out.
I didn’t watch the whole movie, as there were plenty of dialogue scenes with people who clearly aren’t Dick Miller, but I scanned through it and am now confident that whoever Richard Miller is, he isn’t the Dick Miller known and loved everywhere people say “Hey! It’s that guy!” Of course, actually watching the movie isn't sufficient for the folks who run IMDB, because I have submitted a correction multiple times, but it has not been approved, regardless of the evidence I shared. I even watched the whole movie "That Guy Dick Miller" to make sure there weren't any errant mentions of working on a movie in France. So anyway, the IMDB is incorrect and will likely stay that way.
This Week's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Song of the Week is Ping Pong Girl
