Gary Webb, Philip Marlowe, Robert Anton Wilson and Chapel Perilous

Investigative Journalists
I finally caught, on Netflix, Spotlight, this generation's All The President's Men. I had coincidentally been thinking a lot about investigative journalism and journalists and was moved by the story. And how could one not be?

The "Spotlight" group of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe were in the belly of the beast of Catholicism in Unistat. Their footwork, tenacity and courage has seemed to actuate some real change in what seems like an endless run of pedophile priests, with cover-ups going all the way to the Vatican.

The Film Noir Detective Hero
But they were a team, backed by a major metropolitan daily. Woodward and Bernstein: two guys backed by the Washington Post. Still: when I look at ballsy investigative reporting, I keep thinking of some of my favorite characters in my favorite film style: film noir, which flourished in Unistat from 1941-1959, but has never gone away. Some of those films feature the lone private detective who gets hired to do a seemingly simple seedy gig, like finding out if a spouse is cheating. But one thing leads to another, and the detective (Chandler's Philip Marlowe is the best example) finds himself up to his ears in a bigger mystery. Things are not what he thought they were, and he's in great danger.

He's not being paid to solve this big conspiracy - much less report on it for a major newspaper - but he can't help himself: he's the Lone Knight in search of the truth. He takes risks, travels in the labyrinth of The City from the poorest neighborhood to the wealthiest enclaves, trying to piece things together.  Everyone, it seems, is lying to him. But why? He needs to know. He will eventually get knocked out, shot at, drugged, and punched in the solar plexus by hulking meathead gangsters.

He will come out alive, but with the gnosis. The myth of the private detective in films noir: he's a free agent, not well-off, lives by his wits and instinct and street-smart intellect and knows how to talk his way out of a jam and into more knowledge of the situation.

The noir detective drinks, loves beautiful women, and is obviously flawed, and he's no hypocrite. He seems like a profane character, but he's a mostly a man of honor who hates bullshit, who cares about justice in a world that only pays lip service to the idea. In a hopelessly corrupt metropolis, he keeps his integrity. And observes.

It's been noted many times that the Marlowe-type detective harkens back to the Knights of the Grail legends. Which brings us to Chapel Perilous.

Chapel Perilous
I had come across this term when I first tried reading T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland in my early twenties. I didn't follow up on the footnote in the section "What the Thunder said," which tells us to consult "Miss Weston's book." I have since made a study of Jessie Weston's 1919 work of brilliant scholarship, From Ritual to Romance, which studies the Grail legends from primary sources. There are very many variations on Chapel Perilous, with interpolations by later writers. Weston's penultimate chapter covers a few of the versions that involve Chapel Perilous, with Sir Lancelot starring, or sometimes Sir Gawain, and even King Arthur appears.

A generic version of Chapel Perilous: the Knight is riding alone in the forest when a violent storm hits. He finds a chapel in a clearing, often near a cemetery. He'll take refuge from the storm there. He goes in and no one is there, except for a dead knight on the altar, with one long candle lit nearby. There is a window behind and above the altar. Suddenly a Black Hand extinguishes the candle and chapel-shakingly loud haunting voices are heard. The Black Hand looks evil and hideous. Maybe the Knight engages the Black Hand with his sword, and barely makes it out alive.

My favorite version in Weston: King Arthur has fallen off his game: he's a slob and is at risk of losing all fame and prestige he once had. His wife urges him to trek out to the Chapel of St. Austin, which is a very dangerous journey, but may be just the thing to restore Arthur's reputation. He will take with him a young squire, son of (get this) Yvain the Bastard. The squire's name is Chaus. Chaus is like myself: if I have a very exciting and unusual thing to do the next day, I sleep fitfully in anticipatory anxiety.

Chaus decides to sleep in his clothes in the hall, to be ready to roll at daybreak with Arthur. He doesn't want to screw this up. He falls asleep, and then it appears King Arthur has already wakened and left on the journey without him. He immediately jumps up and rushes to his horse, trying to follow the tracks of Arthur's horse. Chaus happens upon a chapel in a glade, near a churchyard. He enters the chapel, but there's no one there, only a dead knight on the altar. There are golden candlesticks burning at the dead knight's head and foot. He takes one of the candlesticks and jams it into one pant-leg, mounts his horse, and goes off searching for Arthur.

Chaus then meets on the road a dark, foul man with a double-edged knife. Chaus asks him, "Have you seen Arthur?" The man says no, but I've met you and you're a thief! You stole that golden candlestick! You're also a traitor. Give me the candlestick! Chaus refuses and the dark man stabs Chaus in the side. Chaus cries out...and then awakens: he'd been asleep in the hall the whole time, yet he has the candlestick and he's been stabbed! Chaus, bleeding out, tells his story, confesses, receives the last rites, and dies.

Weston, after relating many variations of this story, asks what could it all mean? And she's convinced that it is "The story of an initiation (or perhaps it would be more correct to say the test of fitness for an initiation) carried out on the astral plane, and reacting with fatal results upon the physical." (italics in original, pp. 171-172 of the Dover ed.)

Robert Anton Wilson and Chapel Perilous
Robert Anton Wilson uses "Chapel Perilous" as an unforgettable metaphor in his autobiographical book, Cosmic Trigger vol 1 (1977). RAW told Sander Wolff in an interview in 1990 that the "whole book is an account of self-induced brain change." Self-experimentalists and Quantified Self-ies: are you aware that the heritage of your endeavor(s) is brimming with a history of daring, intrepid self-experimentalists like RAW? (I also find Scott Michaelson's take on RAW's self-experimentation compelling: that it was a synthesis of Aleister Crowley and modern neuroscience.) (See Portable Darkness, jacket sleeve, inside cover.)

As I write, there is a group reading of Cosmic Trigger vol 1 going on over at RAWIllumination.net, and if you're reading this at a later date, look for the archives of the reading and the scads of insightful comments and leave your own comments from your reading there, as I sense this is a case in which a "mere blog" will offer up many a nugget for future researchers...

Back to Wilson's take on Chapel Perilous as metaphor:

When researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions (called Chapel Perilous in the trade). You come out the other side either a stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way. (p. 6, CT1) Wilson describes Chapel Perilous as a mind-state that, while undetectable by any instruments, certainly seems all-too real to the person who finds herself in it. Comparing Chapel Perilous to the human Ego, "once you're inside it, there doesn't seem to be any way to get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought." (p.6)

In reading of Wilson's determination to push his nervous system as far as it can go before it breaks (delving into ceremonial magick, psychedelic drugs, various forms of yoga, a deep research into conspiracy theories, even some investigative reporting on his own, etc, etc, etc...) he finds himself the psychologically functional equivalent of the Knight, alone in the isolated Chapel, with a dead knight before him on the altar, and then the otherworldly Black Hand appears...

What does he do? Read the book!

                                                Gary Webb, investigative reporter

Gary Webb
If you don't know who the reporters/investigators I'm talking about here, you really ought to look into their cases for yourself. (See Michael Hastings and Danny Casolaro too?) There are far too many (luminous) details and I suspect at least half of my readers are familiar with these figures anyway. So I'll try to make it brief: Gary Webb got a line on how the CIA was allowing crack cocaine to flood the streets of Los Angeles, in order to fund their covert war against the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Few believed him, but he was smart, with boundless energy, and he produced a series of reports for the small San Jose Mercury-News that made national headlines. Then, the CIA, with a deplorable amount of help from the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times - the reasons seem complicated: they resented being scooped by a relatively small-town paper and some liked the access the CIA allowed them? - Webb quickly went from award-winner to having his own editor and staff gutlessly retract most of Webb's work. There is much to be learned here, my friends, and it's not for the faint of heart.

Perhaps "mendacious" is too strong a word for these big-time journalists and editors, who, taking the CIA's idea an running with it, decided that Webb's work was shoddy and stoked the fears of an already "conspiracy-theory"- minded African American readership. Webb's own paper took him off the investigation beat and he eventually quit, pursued the story alone, but ended up dead in his hotel room eight years after his breakthrough reporting, with two bullet holes in his head from a .38

I read a lot of the full-frontal assault on Webb in the Big Newspapers. One thing that really troubles me (to this day) is that, apparently, we're not supposed to know that the CIA has been involved with gangsters and thugs and drug smuggling since...before they were even called the CIA! Don't reporters go to the library and read the astonishingly well-documented Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred McCoy? How did you miss not reading about the OSS/CIA and their deal with Lucky Luciano and the Mob, the democratic elections in Italy, and the French Connection that flooded the streets of major Unistat cities with heroin?

Another galling thing: many of the "reporters" on the big-city dailies who attacked Webb for stoking conspiracy theories in black communities? Many of them were black themselves. I tracked down a handful and emailed them, politely asking if they've changed their mind about Gary Webb (who turns out to have been right about almost everything, of course). Only one wrote back: Donna Britt, who wrote in the WA Post that the whole CIA/crack cocaine-contra connection "just may not have happened." But still, paranoid cases will go on thinking their conspiracy thoughts. "They know the truth, or one truth anyway: It doesn't matter whether [Webb's "Dark Alliance" series - OG] claims are 'proved' true. To some folks - graduates of Watergate, Iran-Contra, and FBI harassment of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr - they feel so true that even if they're refuted, they'll still be fact to them." (Donna Britt, Washington Post "Finding the Truest Truth," Oct 4, 1996)

Here's what she said in her email to me:

Thanks for your note. The fact is that I honestly don't recall what I wrote about him. That was a long time ago! Sorry to disappoint.....

The boundaries are imaginary. The rules are made up. The limits don't exist....

Apparently she's a book-author now. HERE is her website.

When I think of Gary Webb, I think of his own Chapel Perilous. But: was it brought into existence by thought alone? I think there was more to his. I think Webb's Chapel Perilous somehow has something to do with us.

Other Sources Consulted:
Kill The Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Gary Webb, Nick Schou.

Kill The Messenger (2014 film starring Jeremy Renner as Webb: trailer)

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack-Cocaine Explosion, by Gary Webb

"Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb," by Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept

Censored 2016: chapter 7, "Dark Alliance: The Controversy and the Legacy, Twenty Years On," by Brian Covert, pp.227-253

Murder, My Sweet (1944 Edward Dmytryk) with Dick Powell as Marlowe
The Big Sleep (1946 Howard Hawks) with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe
Lady in the Lake (1947 Robert Montgomery) with Montgomery as Marlowe
Long Goodbye (1973 Robert Altman) with Elliot Gould as Marlowe
Farewell, My Lovely (1975 Dick Richards) with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe
Chinatown (1974 Roman Polanski) with Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes

                                           I personally posed for this photo. The book was
                                           artist Bob Campbell's idea. In reality, the number
                                           of arms is slightly exaggerated.

From Living in a Dystopian Science Fiction Novel to Living in a Watergate-Era Paranoid Thriller in One Week

Those of my fellow intellectual paranoids with a taste for great mid-to-late 1970s Hollywood thrillers like 1975's Three Days of the Condor to Alan J. Pakula's rousing 1974 Parallax View to Pakula's 1976 All The President's Men...and from there my consciousness mind-melds with all the times I spent viewing and re-re-re-viewing, late at night, alone in the dark, The Conversation, Chinatown, Cutter's Way, 1940s films noir, later-than 1979 stuff like Silkwood and Blow Up...and combined with my readings of 20th century history, books on the CIA, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, JFK...I could go on ad nauseum. Anyway: if this tableau resonates, read on.

Okay, so the NSA is watching you read this right now. Let's try to forget that for a moment and go back to a simpler time, a time that the summer of 2013 is trying to rival but just can't. Not yet, at least. The summer of 1975? Let's go back there. I was too young to "get it" but years later I derived numerous garish intellectual paranoia-amphetamine-like thrills from reading about the almost daily national dispatches of what were then new(!) discoveries by the Church Committee (Sen. Frank Church of Idaho), about the history of the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. Try to imagine a time when we thought the CIA only gathered "intelligence" and no one knew what "covert operations" were, and the long-hairs who had been telling us and writing about the CIA overthrowing democratically elected leaders and installing fascist dictators friendly to Yale Men and Wall Street were "fringe" or "lunatics." It all seems so quaint now, but remember: we're in the Summer of '75.

                                         see http://www.privacysos.org/church

Revelations about Hoover and the FBI's antidemocratic maneuvers appeared almost daily in things called "newspapers," which were actually made of paper, and people actually read them. Research tells us that it was quite common to have the "news" delivered via car, truck, or bicycling youngster, to one's own driveway, or even doorstep. Think of it like this: newspapers were like Internet, only you got ink stains on your fingers, and the national security apparatus only noted that you subscribed.

Nixon's resignation and Ford's pardon of Nixon were fresh in Unistatian minds. So was Vietnam, just ending. So were the SLA, the Weather Underground, a new consciousness about oil-rich Sheiks, and...

Everything was topsy-turvy and not like the America you were taught about in your compulsory schooling, and if you were somewhat educated and had a sense of justice, you realized the cops were on the side of The Man, and even if you were a cop (Serpico) or a CIA analyst (Three Days of the Condor), there were murderous, corrupt, unsavory characters you worked side-by-side with.

The Illuminatus! appeared and spread among the underground cognoscenti. It was the perfect thing to chase Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow with; it had more laffs.

The world was rapidly being taken over by the Military-Industrial-Entertainment-Banking-Organized Crime-Complex, and only intrepid seekers/reporters/wizened citizens could do anything about it. How to regain your wits in the face of it all - the news and the films - in 1975? How to retain some semblance of sanity?

Richard Hofstadter, a brilliant academic, had written the seminal rationalist's text on "the paranoid style" in Unistatian history. But the news seemed to be overtaking his thesis. Or maybe it was the drugs. Or maybe the news, the drugs, the films, the novels, and talking to your friends about all those things.

                                            Carl Oglesby, SDS spokesman and later
                                            professor of political science at MIT and 
                                            Dartmouth. A writer/musician/academic.
                                            His book The Yankee and Cowboy War
                                            is one of the great works in what Peter 
                                            Dale Scott calls "deep politics"

Then one of SDS's braintrustees, Carl Oglesby wrote an article for Ramparts in 1974, after Nixon resigned. Titled "In Defense of Paranoia," Oglesby argued, as Francis Wheen wrote in his difficult-to-set-down history of this period, Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia:

"Instead of leading to political madness, the paranoid style might be the necessary prerequisite for retaining one's political sanity - an echo of the 'anti-psychiatry' popularised at the time by R.D. Laing, who held that schizophrenics and paranoids were the only people sane enough to see that the world is deranged. The Hofstadter paradigm was shattered, and has been irreparable ever since. 'Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy,' Norman Mailer wrote in 1992, 'we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia.' The Illuminatus! Trilogy, that key to all mythologies of the early Seventies, features an anarchist sect called the Crazies whose political position is deliberately unintelligible but seems to encompass the worship of Bugs Bunny and study of the Tarot as well as 'mass orgies of pot smoking  and fucking on every street corner.' One of the Crazies explains: 'What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crisis and insanity is the only viable alternative.'" (pp.16-17)

Violent Death of a Great Journalist
Which brings me to the death of Michael Hastings, a couple of days ago. Local Los Angeles TV news's coverage is HERE. David Sirota's obit at Salon. David Weigel, on Hastings, at Slate. Rachel Maddow, from her MSNBC show, HERE. 7 1/2 minutes from the Current TV show The Young Turks, where I felt like I got to "know" Hastings, HERE. Rolling Stone's obit, HERE.

Reading about his death jolted me back into the idiosyncrasies of watching something like Parallax View yet again, late at night, all's quiet, everyone asleep but me, looking for a paranoid fix. Warren Beatty is a radical reporter who only cares about getting to the truth.  It's Clinton or Bush43 or Obama in the White House, but I'm suddenly in the weltanschauung of artistic paranoid intellectuals circa late 1974. Why? Imprinting?

And then back again to my imagination of the crazy summer of 1975 (when, in truth, I was almost totally oblivious of all this ideation, being far too young to yet be warped by all this).

Hastings seemed to have been working on raising awareness of what he saw as the violation of free speech and persecution of another Enemy of the State, Barrett Brown, who was/is a spokesman for the Hacktivist group Anonymous. Here's Glenn Greenwald on the Brown situation. Here's a "Free Barrett Brown" site that includes Michael Hastings as a supporter.

Goddamn. This is all so...garish. To my nervous system...I don't like living in a dystopian science fiction novel. Nor do I enjoy living in a Watergate-era paranoid thriller-world. Or if I have to live in one of those, it feels like it's only fair for me to be able to shelve the book or stop the DVD, go outside and get some fresh air and sunshine, water the plants and exchange jokes with my neighbor, and I dunno...skip along whistling "Beth You Is My Woman Now"...?

I'm not saying rogue LAPD or some of Stanley McChrystal's men or some brutish operatives from the Republicans or Democrats (Hastings, being a rare True Journalist, had enemies in both parties) conspired to kill Hastings. His body was burned beyond recognition. Who knows what happened? Alcohol? Sleep-deprivation? It's probably Just One Of Those Things. (Yea...)

What I will admit is that I'm one of those who has meditated and analyzed and cogitated and fed my poetic faculty such a gawdawful amount of suspicion and paranoia about "official" stories, that it's only natural for me to suspect that just maybe...

And any of you who've been through a similar upbringing, are of a similar caste of mind, and possibly, of a similar mental age...will know exactly what I mean here. I will not spell it out. Just watch Parallax View after immersing yourself in "the news" for three hours a day for a week, reading Robert Anton Wilson in your "spare" time.

With Hastings's death, I experienced a "flashback" to a time I didn't experience when it occurred. It's my "historical imagination." I force-fed myself this stuff at a later date - of my own volition, I remind myself - when I had become "of age." By "stuff" I mean: probably the historical truth that most Unistatians can't face up to, or refuse to acknowledge. And, concomitant to all of this is the present-day world backdrop of confirmation of all the worst things we could have imagined from our own State, with its historically unprecedented technical apparatus to...well, know that you're reading this right where you are sitting now. And maybe you feel, lately, that you live in a particularly byzantine spy novel, given the knowledge. Or a Watergate-era Hollywood thriller. Or maybe you've read this far and you think this OG person is a loon and if so, bless you, blissful person...

I really don't mean to be glib or flippant about Hastings's death; I admired the guy. It's a huge loss for what I call the "truth."

 But maybe I'm so...damaged (?) that I noticed, in the hour or so after I began reading of his 4AM crash near Highland and Melrose...that somehow 1970s-era Robert Redford or Al Pacino or Warren Beatty might have known who was behind it. There are circuits in the brain that, if not paid attention to, can not distinguish between "reality" and "fiction." Or collective hallucination...Do I need to get back into therapy?

And...

Will the Summer of 2013 keep its momentum going and give the Summer of 1975 a run for its money? Stay tuned. (There is no one with even half the guts of Frank Church in congress today, except maybe...Ron Wyden?)

A friend asked me the other day, re: the NSA/Snowden fallout:
-Are you keeping up?

-(Me): Yea, but I'm not sure how much more I can hack for now; I'm reaching critical mass. Maybe I'm gettin' old, man. I need a break. Let's hike the redwoods all day, STAT!

The key, as I see it, is to find a ground between Mailer's apathy and paranoia, to be creative, have a good time, get high, do good for someone else, get paid, and get home in time for dinner.

Trailer for 1974's Parallax View:

More of My Hungarians: John Alton, Mister Film Noir

Just so we're all on the same page here, watch this first. It's 5 minutes long. Go ahead and skip it if you're a film noir junky, though:

John Alton - who some of my film noir friends and I call "Mister Film Noir"- was born on 5 October, 1901 in Sopron/Odenburg, Hungary, died June 2nd, 1996 in Santa Monica, California. He made an enormous number of films - in both Hollywood and Argentina - many of them for very small studios, as "B" pictures. His visual style is one of the great joys in my life and Alton is one of my favorite artists in any medium. And he was "only" a cameraman! A "DP" in the screen trade, or Director of Photography. Ahhh, but he was the Paganini of the DPs!

And his dazzling use of camera angles and especially the use of lighting techniques was/is, to me, transcendent. I can watch an Alton film with the sound off and just marvel at the mood and imagery. Check out this sequence from Raw Deal, a 1948 noir Alton shot with Anthony Mann as director. The male actor is Dennis O'Keefe and the female is the always wonderful Claire Trevor:

Alton had the uncanny ability to use a vast array of camera and lighting effects that complemented the story. I would even go so far as to say his camerawork overall added another, deeper - I hesitate but will proffer "profound" - dimension to any film he worked on, because his virtuosity, in the highest aspirations of the German Expressionistic aesthetic, brought subconscious layers out from "under" the film's surface "meanings." But the psychology of perception forces me to admit, this is only my gloss.

Any film has the writer's/director's/actors'/and other of the filmmakers' intent; once the film is released diverse members of the audience may perceive aspects that were unintended by the makers, or, to choose a bit of fanciful flight, were unconsciously incorporated by the makers, and picked up by (some, but not all?) the audience.

It seems to me that Alton's work fits squarely with this idea. Any film I've seen that he worked on stays with me for days after. Such are the peculiar qualities of light that play upon human consciousness. Hey, they're almost all films noir, but I will find my mind is still interpreting something a few days later, at some odd moment, like when I'm in the shower or brushing my teeth, or sweeping the patio. Ostensibly the great noir films Alton worked on were "merely" crime films, as some relatively clueless critics have written. Oh, no. I think there's much more going on. But you'll have to watch Raw Deal, The Crooked Way, T-Men, The Black Book, Border Incident, The Big Combo, Mystery Street, Witness to Murder, The People Against O'Hara, and the stunning color-noir Slightly Scarlet and see for yourself.

Here's a trailer for He Walked By Night, a film released in 1949 with lots of Los Angeles area locations and night-for-night shots. It's 31 seconds long and someone added modern music to the trailer, but the imagery here looks like the greatest Fritz Lang Expressionistic film from the early 1920s:

No noir camerman ever captured the dark, mean streets of labyrinthine Los Angeles between the years 1945-55 like Alton, in my opinion. Other noir films Alton shot that featured Los Angeles exteriors were The Crooked Way, Hollow Triumph (AKA The Scar), The Big Combo, Talk About A Stranger (suburban LA), and a lot of the incredible T-Men.


In perhaps the most influential essay on noir, "Notes On Film Noir," published in 1972 by Paul Schrader and also collected in Film Noir Reader (first volume), edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Schrader writes:

"Perhaps the greatest master of noir was Hungarian-born John Alton, an expressionistic cinematographer who could relight Times Square at noon if necessary. No cinematographer better adapted the old expressionist techniques to the new desire for realism, and his black-and-white photography in such gritty film noir as T-Men, Raw Deal, I, The Jury, The Big Combo equals that of such German expressionist masters as Fritz Wagner and Karl Freund." - p.56, Film Noir Reader


Some directors loved to work with Alton, and perhaps most notable, noir-wise, was Anthony Mann. Robert E. Smith elaborates: "A favorite Alton technique frequently employed in the Mann films is to dispense with lighting from above altogether, using only lateral illumination. The consequent reduction in light intensity greatly lengthens and accentuates shadows, resulting in a very dramatic lighting scheme of small points of illumination, around which strikingly deep shadows fall. Large portions of the mise-en-scene are thereupon drenched in darkness, lit just enough to vaguely distinguish whatever objects might be there. Often the only source of illumination will be the studio's artful and often poetic approximation of natural light, such as the moonlight which shines through the venetian blinds of Marsha Hunt's bedroom in Raw Deal..." - p.191, ibid, "Mann in the Dark: the Films Noir of Anthony Mann"

Another director, Joseph H. Lewis, was asked about working with Alton on Lewis's film The Big Combo:

Q: How about John Alton on The Big Combo?

Lewis: The man was, unfortunately for him really, so good, so brilliant, so magnificent. He was too good for the studio that he was at, and he frightened all other photographers. He frightened the heads of the photographic departments. He frightened the executives who hire the photographers. And what was the result? They kicked him out. [More on this later: the OG]

Lewis continues: All you had to do was say to him, "Look, John, I see a girl coming out of a door that only has one little inch-wide streak of light. And as she comes through that light comes clean across her face, but only one inch at a time. And she emerges from darkness now into another sun-lit room and passes through that only for an instant. Then into complete darkness so you only see a silhouette of her against a white background. This is how I see it, John." Now, you know, I was only shooting off the top of my head. He'd say, "Fine." And I'd go sit for a few minutes and suddenly he'd say, "Ready." I'm not kidding. He had them all buffaloed with his technique. Me, too. It was magic. He'd put a light there, a backlight there, and a front light kicker here and say, "Ready." - p.83, Film Noir Reader 3

Here's the director John Sayles talking about another Mann-Alton noir, Border Incident, released in 1949. It's 2 minutes, 53 seconds:

Sayles opines that Alton was influenced by Gabriele Figueroa here, especially in "low-angle" shots, but I think Sayles is shooting from the hip: Alton had an entire theory of low-angle shots well considered before he ever went into Mexico. (Much of Border Incident was shot in Mexicali, according to the 3rd edition of the encyclopedia Film Noir, edited by Silver and Ward.) Alton likely got the low angle nuances nailed with all of his work in Argentina before he returned to America after ten years. (See his filmography.)...Speaking of Ricardo Montalban (as the above trailer did, briefly), Alton worked with him again, less than a year later on Mystery Street, which your public library or NetFlix might have. It's a solid noir film with Montalban as a scientifically-minded detective and he's good, but, to me - surprise! - it's Alton's style that steals the show...

Alton wrote a book on his techniques, titled Painting With Light. Most of it is textbook-ish, and quite technical. But get a load of some of the chapter titles: "Mystery Lighting," "Special Illumination," and "Visual Symphony." Just as Paganini's Caprices set the bar higher for every virtuoso violinist in Europe for at least 50 years during the 19th century, so Alton's book is his technical manual for dazzling camera and lighting virtuosity. If you're not interested in the arcane technical minutiae of camera and lights for movies, read Todd McCarthy's wonderful introduction to the book, which is perhaps the best biographical writing on Alton that I've seen.

[For more information on John Alton, see HERE and especially HERE.]

John Alton said that "black and white are colors." He thought that studio lighting absolutely required the simulation of natural light, at the service and aim of what he called texture. He thought it essential that the DP think like a DP and not like a director, and that a new director who once worked as a DP must try to only think like a director. As Alton said, "I didn't become a director because every time I looked at a scene, I saw the light on the actors' faces, and didn't hear what they were saying, so I knew I wasn't going to be a good director."

What amazes me is that he accomplished all of this while working on some of the cheapest - but great! -B movies of the late 1940s, when studios had very little money. But that's why studios like Republic and Monogram loved him so much: not only was he extremely good, but he worked at such a speed that it saved them money.

Actually, the drive to save money seems to favor an artist like Alton. Not in remuneration, but in freedom to stretch out his craft in an almost luxurious way...The old studio system allowed very many gifted artists to work "a lot" and in Alton's case it amounted to a series of technically breathtaking bravura performances...

In 1951 Vincent Minelli brought in Alton to film a dance sequence for his film An American In Paris. The DP for the rest of the film felt slighted, but Minelli said he'd wanted to do something edgy by bringing in Alton...to film in color. And Alton won an Oscar for his work then. Alton lost the job on Singin' In The Rain precisely because his style was "too dark." (And I for one am glad Alton lost that job!)

The thing that Joseph H. Lewis said about Alton frightening others? Eventually Alton got sick of Hollywood and the egos and attitudes and became a sort of Garbo figure. (He did photograph the pilot episode for TV's Mission Impossible, though.)

There is so much I've left out about John Alton, one of my favorite Hungarians. But I must add this passage, from his Painting With Light, because it reveals something about his feel for noir films:

"To realize the power of light and what it can do to the mind of the audience, visualize the following scene:

"The room is dark. A strong streak of light sneaks in from the hall under the door. The sound of steps is heard. The shadows of two feet divide the light streak. A brief silence follows. There is suspense in the air. Who is it? What is going to happen? Is he going to ring the bell? Or just insert a key and try to come in? Another heavier shadow appears and blocks the light entirely. A dim hissing sound is heard, and as the shadow leaves, we see in the dim light a paper slip onto the carpet. The steps are heard again...This time they leave. A strong light appears once more and illuminates the light on the floor. We read it as the steps fade out in the distance. 'It is ten o'clock. Please turn off your radio. The Manager.'"

I suspect we have another modern Illuminati with John Alton, but maybe that's just me...

Finally, here's a short titled "John Alton: Cinematic Poet."It's a 58-second edited clip from the climax of He Walked By Night, the culmination of a manhunt through the sewers of Los Angeles after a Unabomber-like figure, played by Richard Basehart. Many people think the idea here was stolen from the far more famous film, The Third Man, but He Walked By Night was shot at roughly the same time as Sir Carol Reed's film, or possibly slightly before. It depicts a modern underworld of the Fallen quite graphically. No dialogue is necessary. It's all texture and light and gloomy and doomy, with violence-sodden mood. It feels incredibly desperate, claustrophobic, and Sartrean No-Exit-ish to the nth to me, maybe even gnostic. Note: it's just after World War II and the LAPD has already incorporated military weapons. See what you think about this Doomed World: