Norman Mailer (left) and Rip Torn (right) after their fight in the film Maidstone
In the space of a few days, enough has been written about the passing of Norman Mailer - whether you believe him to be a colossus of US literature or a misogynist thug - without me adding any more hot air (I quite liked Why Are We In Vietnam? though).
But there is another side to the Mailer oeuvre that has gone entirely unacknowledged in the obits: his career as a filmmaker.
Mailer saw himself as a modern day renaissance man who could turn his creative hand to almost anything. But, as these finds by Subterranean Cinema make abundantly clear, his talents didn't extend into the world of movies, despite his best efforts.
Mailer wrote, directed and starred in three films between 1968 and 1970, Maidstone, Wild 90 and Beyond The Law, each utilising an experimental, improvisational method and each starring Rip Torn alongside Mailer. The plots were laughable. In Maidstone, for instance, a Hollywood director (guess who?) runs for President. Keen to dissolve the 'false' barriers between fiction and reality, Mailer and Torn spent a lot of time wrestling, calling each other crazy bastards and attacking each other with hammers.
Undaunted, Mailer persevered. Earlier this year, the New Yorker recounted the story of Mailer's last film, the 1986 adaptation of his own book, Tough Guys Don't Dance.
The consensus was that once again his film never achieved its grandiose ambition, but that as a director Mailer certainly made things interesting on set. (The producer of Tough Guys, Tom Luddy, described it as "Tarantino before its time.")
And it seems there's one legacy Mailer has left the film industry. Ever the perfectionist, he complained about the phoney "punch" sounds used on movie soundtracks, and so he locked himself away with the sound designer and repeatedly punched himself in the face.
The sound designer claims to have used the more accurate sound of Mailer's masochism in countless features since. Whatever your views on the man, that anecdote seems as fitting - and rewarding - an epitaph as any.
