Ulmer’s Legacy

It was sometime in 1967 that I was ushered into a small, cramped Hollywood facility where I was to do a rewrite on a low-budget horror movie. The story line went something like this: A man is imprisoned by a mad scientist and injected with some concoction that would change him into a killer fish. And I would work with the man who was going to direct this project--a rather, tall, elegant man named Edgar G. Ulmer, someone I had never heard of (“Riches From a Fast, Cheap Master,” by Kenneth Turan, Aug. 1).

Of course, I found the story preposterous, but no more so than the monster chicken story written by a UCLA film chum of mine, Dennis Jakob, who had scraped together this little gem for Roger Corman. So what the hell. I took a whack at the Ulmer piece. The money man (not Ulmer) paid me my two weeks’ wages with a couple of bad checks that the DA’s office helped me to collect. I decided this would not be the kind of writing that a recent graduate film school student should undertake (WRONG!).

Years later, I saw Ulmer’s masterwork, “Detour,” and sadly realized the conditions that this most modest of men allowed himself to work under. Later, I met Ulmer’s widow, and for a time we worked together to try to remake “Detour” with a freshened version of the story by Ulmer. I contacted Francois Truffaut, who was an admirer of Ulmer’s. He passed on the project, not wanting to do material other than his own. He, however, suggested Ivan Passer to direct the remake. By the time this began to jell, Peter Bogdanovich had the rights to the project. The rest is minor history.

It would have been interesting, however, to see what Passer would have done with this strange, haunting film by a forgotten and overlooked master of the medium.

STEPHEN KABAK

Sherman Oaks