Remembering Writer Charles Willeford

Monte Hellman (r) with Warren Oates (l) and Charles Willeford in Cockfighter.

When producer Roger Corman optioned Charles Willeford's novel, Cockfighter, Willeford jumped at the chance to write the screenplay. Willeford also had a small part in the film, and he admired its star, Warren Oates. Nonetheless, Willeford felt oddly "superfluous" on the movie set. "Once the script has been set and a production schedule figured out, typed, and distributed," Willeford wrote in Cockfighter Journal, "the presence of the writer makes everyone in the cast and crew apprehensive ... I get the feeling that everyone thinks I might want to change something in the script." Willeford died in 1989, but today, his subversive world view, characterized by its moral ambiguity and absurdist idealism, is a welcome and resonant force in literature -- a new anthology, Writing and Other Blood Sports, is being published this month -- and film. On Sunday, March 12, SXSW Film will screen Cockfighter, as part of its Monte Hellman retrospective, and Woman Chaser, a new film directed by SMU grad Robinson Devor and produced by Joe McSpadden. Woman Chaser was shot in L.A. in 38 days (and stars Patrick Warburton, Elaine's boyfriend Puddy on Seinfeld), and the advance buzz is very, very good. Betsy Willeford, widow of the late writer, is flying in from Miami for the double-whammy. Her insight is priceless. Of 1974's Cockfighter, she told me recently, "Hellman hated shooting the cockfight sequences; he's squeamish." One of the film's more inspired sequences, in her admittedly biased opinion, is "the transition from Frank Mansfield starting to take a leak from the back of a truck in Ed Middleton's backyard to Martha Middleton pouring a glass of orange juice." Between the three film adaptations of her husband's work -- 1990's Miami Blues, Cockfighter, and Woman Chaser -- Betsy finds the latter, "with its likable despicable narrator, to be the most faithful adaptation to date ... Richard Hudson, the car salesman who wants to be a movie director, is as single-minded and amoral as Frank Mansfield [in Cockfighter]. He crushes anything for the sake of his artistic ambition, and finally is crushed by the bottom-liners and bottom-feeders that run the movie industry. I think Charles would have been gratified by this movie, its moments of high absurdity and its -- not to get too academic here -- serious medium-as-metaphor intent." Sounds like an essential tonic for any gathering of serious film aficionados.