29 April 1974. Georgian Terrace Hotel. Atlanta, Ga.

The main ballroom of the Georgian Terrace Hotel, and the lobby, were used for the main entrance hall and ballroom in Gone With the Wind. It seemed peculiar to me today at noon to be sitting around four long tables, placed in a rough square, eating lunch in the main ballroom. There has been little or no change in the ballroom since GWTW was filmed in this room, but the film company, all of us in jeans, Cockfighter T-shirts, and sweaty from the work in the hot corridors and complicated room set-ups on the sixth floor, were a raunchy-looking lot for the elegant surroundings. Other than myself, I doubt if anyone in the company knows that the GWTW ballroom scene was shot here, not that they would care any more than I do. The film crews with Selznick were probably just as raunchy looking in 1939.

The nest of rooms in the corner suites are angular and circular rooms, with narrow connecting corridors and there was considerable delay before Nestor, Don, and Monte worked out methods, most of them with dollies, to shoot the robbery scenes, and the scenes in the bathroom. Once filming started it went well enough, but the shooting of all the scenes, including the shots of Omar and Frank in the bedroom, wasn't completed until after one a.m. When it became obvious that it was going to be a late, a very late night, there was a break for dinner, with dinner paid for by the company. It was set up in the Italian restaurant next door to the hotel, and that was a mistake. Everybody ordered drinks the moment they sat down, and accompanied them with heavy Italian food. It took Peter Cornberg an hour and a half, after everyone had finished eating, to get everybody back up to the sixth floor. And then, once he did get them back, nobody could find Monte Hellman for another hour. So shooting finally started again with a grumbling rebellious crew, a crew and cast partially stupefied with too much food and too many martinis. Then, when the shooting was over, the crew still had two hours work in clearing things away and reloading the CECOmobile, taking the equipment downstairs on the freight elevator. Peter Cornberg, by 11 p.m., was concerned. He called Sam Gelfman in New York, and asked him to come back.

I talked to Sam on the phone, too, and told him I would make some cuts in the script for tomorrow's shooting in the country. The scenes between Robertearl Jones and Dick Shull are mostly characterization lines anyway, so I can cut most of the dialogue, except for the plot lines, and let it go at that. Peter worries unnecessarily, I think--the crew bitches, and why not?--but they are all professionals. And so, with a late start tomorrow--around noon--everything will be fine.

Millie Perkins and Troy Donahue arrived in the afternoon. Millie will play

Frances Mansfield, Randy's wife, and Troy will play Randolph, Frank's brother. I'm not very happy with the casting of Millie as Frances. She's a fine actress, but hopelessly miscast as Frances. When she was nominated for an Academy Award 15 years ago for The Diary of Anne Frank, she deserved it certainly, but I wanted a fat, unattractive housewife for Randy's wife, a woman who has let herself go out of boredom from living in the country.

Frances is slim (slight, in fact) and a fairly tall woman with a kinky Afro hairstyle. She resembles a blowsy Southern housewife as much as Troy Donahue looks like Warren Oates' younger brother, which he is supposed to be. With Troy, it doesn't matter so much; audiences are used to the convention that actors aren't really brothers. It's almost a rule of thumb to use the obviously Jewish children of producers for the offspring of Wasp couples in films, so Troy will be an acceptable brother as Randolph Mansfield. Troy is no longer just a pretty face; the puffiness around his eyes, and his pale face, will aid him considerably as Frank's alcoholic brother.

After my initial disappointment in Millie Perkins I let it go at that, figuring that Monte must have had some special idea in mind for the role of Frances. Tonight, talking to Peter Cornberg, I found out why Monte selected her. Peter told me that there was no problem in finding out-of-work fat actresses, but that Millie Perkins was an old friend of Monte's. Also, Monte has a personal theory about being the director of repertoire films. He has used Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Pat Pearcy, Laurie Bird, and Millie Perkins in his other films, so he wanted to use Millie again (whether she was right physically for the part or not). I could see why he wanted to use Laurie Bird for Dody White (they live together and her salary stays in the family, so to speak), but now there are three tall, skinny women playing the only three major female roles in the film. Except for hair color, all three are neurasthenic ectomorphs; only Pat Pearcy is exactly right in her role of Mary Elizabeth. And yet, insofar as the film is concerned, it won't make any real difference to the audience which sees the finished picture. The audience always accepts what they see; the difference is that the conception would have been better, in my opinion, if the body types were different. The one great advantage of film, over repertoire theater companies, is that one can cast a film from world-wide sources. So why not take advantage of it?

In the long run, I will be ahead of the game. Now that I have also been in one of Monte's films, he'll add me to his film repertoire group, and in his next film he'll call me for a part. Who knows? In Monte's next film I might be a rock-and-roll teenager.

The only way a film repertoire company can work is if the director writes and directs his own films, knowing in advance the actors he'll have to work with, as Bergman does. But many of Bergman's films, with the same actors, resemble each other, and one is never positive whether one has seen the film before.

The call for tomorrow is 11 a.m. There will then be a two-hour drive to Rooster City, Billy Abbott's game farm, which will be used as Omar's farm.

Even with the cuts I made (I cut all of Buford's lines) I still don't see how we can finish the schedule by 8 p.m. tomorrow night. But if the bright sun-shiny weather holds, and if the crew doesn't resign in a body and catch the next plane back to L.A., well...

30 April 1974. Georgian Terrace Hotel. Atlanta, Ga.

I awoke at four a.m. with a nosebleed, caused probably by my high blood pressure, and perhaps by some of the tension I've been under for the last week or so--although I haven't been consciously aware of being under any tension. I've been tired, of course. It was after two a.m. before I got to bed. A 17-hour day is overdoing your bit for art...

Anyway, today was a wrap-up for me. I managed to get my nose to stop bleeding by 5:30 a.m., and then went down to breakfast at six a.m. Troy, who had been out all night, was just coming wearily into the hotel as I reached the lobby.

He looked like death warmed over--a perfect Randy Mansfield.

After eating I felt fine, so I went back to bed and slept until 10:15. I could've slept longer, but the air-conditioner froze over, and there was no air in the room. The temperature was at least 90 degrees, and the windows were as tight as train windows to open.

A shower got rid of my headache, and I dressed and rode out to Rooster City with Billy Abbott and John Trotter. The farm is tremendous. Billy has more than 300 gamecocks on tether and on coop-walks, cocks he sells and fights on world-wide basis. Billy's parents live in a four-bedroom, two living-room house about 75 yards behind Billy's house, and Billy's mother gave me the best lunch I've had since I've been on location: braised beef, cabbage, buttered home fries, home-canned pickled okra, cornbread, and iced tea. She had picked tart apples off the tree that very morning, and baked two fresh apple pies. I turned down the offer of ice cream on my apple pie by telling her I was on a diet. She looked at me a little funny, I thought.

The crew arrived at 2:30, and so did Sam, and we were shooting by a little after three. There were two main scenes. This was supposed to be Omar's farm, so we shot the exterior scene where Frank and Omar become partners for the season, and the exterior champagne drinking scene (which I modeled ironically after Ernst Lubitsch) where Frank, Omar and Buford celebrate, in advance, before they leave for the Milledgeville tournament. The cuts I did last night didn't hurt anything. Some characterization was lost, of course, but no plot exposition.

There was another pick-up scene with Warren, the short scene where he pisses over the back of the truck, but I left before that scene was shot, riding back to Atlanta with Richard B. Shull and his wife Marilyn. Today was a wrap-up for Dick Shull, too.

The next two days will complete the scenes at Frank's farm and the swimming pool scene with Mary Elizabeth. The latter will be on a closed set, and I wouldn't want to be there anyway, where my presence might embarrass either one of them. Warren already told me he was reluctant to do this scene, and he claimed Pat was nervous about it as well. Actually, there isn't much to it; they will only be partially nude, and if Pat reads her lines right, which she will, the scene will be touching and charming.

2 May 1974. Georgian Terrace Hotel. Atlanta, Ga.

I had lunch today in The Peking, a Chinese restaurant in some outlying Atlanta shopping center) we went there by taxi), with Dick and Marilyn Shull. Dick arrived in Tocoa three weeks ago dead set against cockfighting but willing to play the part of Omar anyway, as a professional actor. After talking to him today, I think he is now neutral about the sport, as I am myself--neither for nor against it.

Dick's change of attitude came about because of Billy Abbott and John Trotter. If two outstanding men like them could be into the sport full time, it simply could not be a reprehensible pastime. I have never met two finer men in my life; they are truly southern gentlemen in every respect. I talked to Billy Abbott this evening on the telephone. He told me the breakfast scene between Frances, Randy and Frank went off well this morning. And in the afternoon they finished the scene where Frank dances madly about the car that contains Mary Elizabeth's senile mother. The latter scene, included despite my protests to Sam and Monte, probably won't make any difference to the audience that sees it, but it merely provides a cheap, unexpected laugh at the expense of Frank's characterization. Frank would never make fun of the old lady, even if she couldn't understand what he was doing. But Monte seems to feel that the story needs punching up at this point for contrast, so he added the scene to the script. Maybe so, but this is a stupid way to do it.

All that remains is the house-moving and the swimming pool love scene. If it rains, Leonard Allen has got two barns staked out for he love scene and either one of them would be satisfactory as an alternate location. There will be a few pick-up scenes for the second unit to take on Saturday, some driving shots of Frank's truck going through the country and, of course, the motel "dream" sequence, which can be shot quickly in the new Holiday Inn where the company's staying in Lithonia.

Tomorrow I'll be interviewed by a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and then I fly back to Miami late tomorrow afternoon.

Friday is the first day of the spring semester, and I'll be back in the classroom, back to mundane reality, teaching D. H. Lawrence to bewildered strangers.

The more I think about things, the more I admire Roger Corman and his intuitive mind.

Cockfighter, I am certain, is a winner. It will cause some controversy, pro and con, but we can't lose with this film. Because audiences can see an illegal sport legally, they will come to see the film out of curiosity, and then will spread the word about it because it has a good strong story. Frank is the first totally silent hero since Singer, in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, but Frank is willfully silent, not a deaf-mute. So Frank's stubbornness will appeal to anyone who talks too much, which includes writers like myself.

10 May 1974 Miami, Florida

Before the plane left Atlanta, I met Millie Perkins in the airport. She was taking the same plane as I was, traveling down to North Miami to see her mother.

Millie told me that Monte and Sam cut the line where she says about Randy, her husband, "Randy's such a snob. He's never forgiven my father for being a dentist." Millie and Troy both pleaded for Monte and Sam to allow the line to remain, because it says so much about Randy as a person --that simple little line.

But they cut it because both of them, Monte and Sam, have relatives who are dentists, and they didn't want to offend these members of their families. (!!!!!!!!)

Sam Gelfman and Frances Kimbrough both phoned me, and gave me the final details. On the final day, on the way to shoot the swimming pool scene, the CECOmobile turned over, and got stuck in a ditch. The cameras were on the side that was down. They tried to get a farmer to pull them out with a tractor, and he failed. Then they had to wait for an hour and a half for a wrecker.

Monte gave up and went to sleep in the Winnebago. Peter Cornberg arrived, wrung his hands, and suggested trying everything that had been suggested and tried before he arrived.

Finally the wrecker got there. "Shit," the wrecker driver said, "I thought you was stuck." He had the CECOmobile righted and back on the road in two minutes flat. They arrived at the pool, an idyllic setting on a beautiful day, and in one set-up and with one long take, shot the scene and wrapped up.

Monte didn't take any covering shots, but as it turned out, the scene came out beautifully, moving and touching.

One important thing I've learned about making a movie: You never know until you try, and you would never try if you only knew.

Dec. 10, 1987 South Miami, Florida

Cockfighter, the movie, was released 13 years ago. It opened in 58 theaters in Georgia, and was panned by the Atlanta reviewers in the newspapers. The gist of the reviews was that Georgians really didn't engage in cockfighting, and even if a few of them did (out in the rural areas), the prominent Georgians who played in the film, with speaking parts and as extras, shouldn't have done so. I considered such reviews vicious, and wished they had reviewed the movie instead of the social aspects, but city people, I suppose, rather resented the exposure of cockfighting in Georgia.

There was a premiere, which then Governor Jimmy Carter attended. He said he enjoyed the movie.

The movie did well in drive-ins in South Carolina and Georgia, and then the prints moved down into northern Florida. It soon became obvious that the movie was not going to do well in the cities. Women did not want to go see it, which meant that couples on dates went to movies elsewhere. By the time the film got to Fort Myers, Florida, Roger Corman pulled the prints, and the movie was retitled Born to Kill. A new campaign was launched, with new two-sheet movie posters showing Warren Oates wielding an ax. No mention of cockfighting was in the posters. This ploy didn't work, of course, and the film was withdrawn.

The movie did well overseas, especially in England, and in South American countries (with Spanish subtitles). Sight and Sound, the British film magazine, listed it as one of the ten best foreign films shown in England during 1974, placing it between Amarcord and Scenes from a Marriage. It was shown at several film festivals, Edinburgh and London, and also at Telluride, and those audiences seemed to like the film. But it lost money.

Roger Corman has directed and produced some 137 films, and Cockfighter, he said, was the only movie he ever lost any money on. I suppose this is true, but he didn't lose much, because the movie was only budgeted for $450,000.

And that isn't a lot of dough for a full length movie, especially with the first rate cast that acted in the film. Cockfighter has not, as yet, been on network television, and it may be a long time before it is. It may, in time, appear on the cable channels, but none of the cable companies, to my knowledge, has picked it up as yet. If they do, Roger will probably get his investment back. The film is available on tape, however, as an Embassy release, and, in my opinion, it looks better on the small TV screen than it does on the big screen. The missing transition shots, the missing reaction shots, which made the film look slightly jumpy on the big screen, aren't noticeable on the tube. We're used to jumpy commercials and MTV quick cuts on TV, so it doesn't bother home viewers when transitions are lost, or missing.

A lot has happened during the last 13 years to the people who worked on Cockfighter.

Roger Corman sold New World Pictures, and the last time I saw him --two years ago in L.A.--he told me he was going to start another company.

I haven't had any contact with Monte Hellman since the film, and I haven't seen any new director credits for him. I did notice that he was the film editor for a movie called The Killer Elite. But I don't know what he's doing now.

Warren Oates died, at the age of 53, from a heart attack, and this affected me deeply for several weeks, as it always does when someone you admire, who is also younger than you, dies suddenly. I have survived three heart attacks, and part of my depression was caused by the recognition of my own mortality. Warren smoked, of course, and so do I. Most people with heart trouble smoke, as a way to defy the odds, but Warren did several movies after Cockfighter, both bad and good, and he could have worked as a character actor forever.

Steve Railsbeck became a star, just as his agent predicted. He played Manson in a two-part TV special, and he did outstanding work in The Stuntman, with Peter O'Toole. So he has come a long way from the poor young actor who planned to sell his new shoes and slacks when he got back to New York from Georgia--simply because he needed the money.

Laurie Bird, who played a couple of bits in films after Cockfighter, leaped out of a window and killed herself in New York. She was with a famous pop singer when she defenestrated herself, and he was quite upset by her suicide.

For a while there it seemed that Harry Dean Stanton was in every movie released in Hollywood, but in addition to character roles, he has starred in some big films, too. At any rate, he can now pick and choose the films he wants to do.

I have seen Millie in one or two films, but she doesn't seem interested in working. I saw her in Wall Street and hardly recognized her.

Pat Pearcy works steadily in soap operas, and has been in a few films since Cockfighter. And Troy Donahue, although he hasn't regained his former glory as a star, played the gigolo-lover of Mike Corleone's sister in Godfather, Part II. He was, it goes without saying, perfect in the part.

Nestor Almendros has photographed many films since 1974, and won an Academy Award as a cinematographer.

Ed Begley, Jr. has made some films, but has made a reputation for himself playing a doctor on the St. Elsewhere TV series. This may or may not be the last year for St. Elsewhere, but he should be able to retire, if he so desires, on his residuals when the series goes into reruns.

Frances Kimbrough, Roger's factotum, went back to England, I heard from someone, and is teaching Middle English at a British university. I corresponded with her for a couple of years after the film came out, but we lost track of one another.

I retired from teaching in 1981, and I have had seven books published since then, and three more books will be coming out in 1988. Five of my earlier novels have been reissued in paperback, including Cockfighter (Black Lizard Books), and the novel has found a new audience. My series, Miami Blues, New Hope for the Dead, and Sideswipe, featuring Homicide detective-sergeant Hoke Moseley, has been quite successful, and I have made so much money from my books I'll never have to write another screenplay.

Several times, I'll admit, during the last few years, I've considered the idea of writing an original screenplay. But when I remember those days in the Hollywood-Roosevelt Hotel, writing nine pages a day, seven days a week, and know that I would have to do two more rewrites under similar conditions, I start another novel instead. Last year when my novel Miami Blues was optioned for a film (many are optioned, but few are made) I was asked if I wanted to write the screenplay, and without hesitation, I said, "No."

Home is the hunter,

Home from the hill.