Monday, August 07, 2006

Now about Walt's People progress:
The manuscript for Volume 4 is now complete and has been sent to all the authors for last revisions. This means that we are still on track to reach the December 2006 release date. The keystone of the volume will be the Dick Huemer Oral History by Joe Adamson. But with the addition of Charles Solomon, Alberto Becattini and Brian Sibley as participants to the project, there is a lot more than great Dick Huemer material in that volume.
This means of course that I started working seriously this weekend on Volume 5, that will include a huge amount of never-published-before material, including quite a few of the interviews conducted by Richard Hubler in the late '60s for his never released biography of Walt.

Since quite a few of the interviews in Volume 5, will focus on WWII, here is a small anedote that I read with pleasure this weekend and that happened during the war. As told by T. Hee:
"I’ll tell you one little incident about Walt that I think was characteristic. Major de Seversky, of course, had one leg. He had been shot off in the war and he wore a false leg. And it had a habit of squeaking as he walked from one part of the set when they were filming scenes… it would squeak. We had a sound man here at that time, named Sam, who had an ear just like an owl. He could hear everything. And they would make a take and Walt would say, “That’s good.” And Sam would say, “No, Walt, there’s a squeak there in the background.” So they’d shoot it again, and he said this about three times and they were running late, and Walt said, “Well, what the hell’s the squeak, Sam?” And de Seversky said, “Well, I think it must be my leg.” He swung his leg back and forth and he said, “Well, you know, it’s squeaky.” Walt said, “Oh, hell, my knee squeaks like that sometimes...” in order to make de Seversky feel good. So he said, “Leave the squeak in, Sam, let’s go ahead.”

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