But when I dug up King's old blurbs, guess who was at the top of the ad for the movie, enthusing: "Finally, a Movie Worth Seeing Over and Over Again!"
Larry! I thought you didn't like the movie! "I didn't," he explained. "I told the CNN person to tell the studio, 'I didn't understand the damn movie at all. I'd have to see it over and over again to figure out what happened.' And then they went and used it!"
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday February 15, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 26 words Type of Material: Correction
'Screamers': The Big Picture column in Tuesday's Calendar section described the film "Screamers" as being about Turkish genocide. It is about the Armenian genocide in Turkey.
King's blurb for "The Good Shepherd" was originally "arguably the best spy movie ever," but Universal asked if he would drop the qualifier. "I said fine, I don't mind," King says, shaking his head. "Hey, I want the movie to be good."
King has always wanted to like movies. After hearing him talk about his childhood in Brooklyn, it's easy to understand how movies became so deeply rooted in his psyche. When King was 9, his father dropped dead of a heart attack working at a defense plant. The police came to notify the family and, to take the young boy's mind off his loss, one of the cops took King to see "Bataan," a Robert Taylor war movie. Surely the experience of being swept away in the womblike darkness of the theater, stirred by the heroics of men his father's own age, must've had a transforming impact on King's view of film as an escape from any daily troubles.
"I remember the cop broke the news to me slowly as we were driving to the theater," King says in a gruff dems 'n' doses accent that trumpets his Brooklyn origins. "Ya know, I got mad at my father for dying. I thought he just left me. It took me years to get over it."
After his father's death, King's family struggled. "We were dirt poor," he says. "I was on relief [welfare] for two years." Movies didn't put food on the table, but in Brooklyn, they put plates on the table. Anyone who went to the neighborhood theater, the Benson, on Friday night, received a free plate. "We ended up with a whole set of dishes and plates from the Benson," King says.
His favorite pictures were rousing crowd-pleasers. "I loved 'Gunga Din,' " he says, rattling off titles, injecting blurb-jectives as he goes. "Sands of Iwo Jima" ("Loved it!"); "State Fair" ("No one was better than Dana Andrews!"). His first crush was on Joan Leslie, but there were others: Betty Grable ("She was hot!") followed by Jane Russell in "The Outlaw" ("They had to cover her breasts in the ads!").
