William Leece discovers there’s a lot more to film director Alex Cox’s new book, after 30 years of experience
THERE’S not supposed to be such a thing as a free lunch. And anyone who thinks he can short circuit the process and grab a free copy of film-maker Alex Cox’s new book might be in for a bit of a surprise.
Wirral-born Cox’s fascination with the Italian-made “Spaghetti Westerns” of the 1960s and 70s is well documented.
He wrote a substantial and slightly acade mic history of the genre, entitled 10,000 Ways To Die in the late 1970s, and anyone who wants a copy is more than welcome to download it completely free from the internet.
But reader beware. There’s a new version of 10,000 Ways to Die about to hit the streets. And it’s more than just a revised edition of the survey 30-odd years ago.
Alex Cox is quite mischievous about it. “The old one I wrote as a sort of thesis,” he explains. “It’s full of the jargon of the 1970s, words like semiotics and that kind of stuff, but that was the way you had to talk in those days.”
When the first version was completed, Cox, now 54, was a young film-maker who’d just finished a stint at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
He was just embarking on a life as an independent film-maker, with the highly thought-of Repo Man still in the pipeline.
“It did seem that when I became a film-maker that that didn't have much too do with anything, really,” he admits. “Except perhaps the psychology or the psychosis of a film maker. But it wasn’t something you thought of in any practical terms when you were constructing a story.”
Three decades on, and Cox is an experienced film maker and writer and commentator on films. The original idea had been to re-title the new book Massacre Time, but his publishers insisted in keeping the old title as he surveys the genre from its beginnings in 1963 to the 3-D Comin’ at Ya, in 1983.
It all goes back to schooldays at Wirral Grammar School in the 1960s.
Cox has written of the testosterone-charged atmosphere of a boys-only school and the appeal of the violent fantasies and near-anarchy of the Italian Westerns. It was a time when the American originals seemed to have lost their creative impulse, subsiding into a series of, in Cox’s words, “ponderous Technicolor bores” and their TV series clones.
