THE MAKING OF ATTACK SQUADRON

The Making of Attack Squadron     By Charles E.J. Moulton Born 1969, M, from Herten, NRW, Germany                     This Story was written by my father, the veteran actor Herbert Eyre Moulton (1927 - 2005) in 1998 about the making of his first motion Picture ATTACK SQUADRON in Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, in 1961. I’ve been delving lately into The Archives --- The Archives being a collection of exquisitely varied plastic shopping-bags and a battered old volume bearing the label: Herb’s crapbook (the capital “S” having fallen by the wayside somewhere along the line) and I’ve discovered a rather startling fact: of all the movies I’ve worked in over the years, either as a dialogue coach or actor or whatever --- every single one of them has been a flop --- that is, if they were ever released at all. Admittedly a couple of them deserved to bomb, due to a bad script or rotten timing or faulty promotion, or inflated hubris or just plain bloody-mindedness on the director’s part. But not all of them were stinkers. Quite the contrary --- aside from the obvious abomination or two, some were of superior quality, as we shall see, with imaginative screenplays or those about to be ... hardly deserving such a fate. Of their actual histories, one of them enjoyed a spectacular Hollywood-style premiere at a leading Vienna movie palace, with speeches, floodlights, and a gala party --- then curled up a died a death. Another made it all the way to America, but ended up as a soft-porn video (mea maxima culpa!) As far as anyone can discover, two of the really good films haven’t even crept out of the cutting-rooms yet. So now, having surfed through all this bilge, I detect a rather ominous pattern beginning to emerge: one cannot be involved in so many fiascos without something being at the root of it, something a good deal more sinister than ordinary tough luck or coincidence. No, something rather uncanny has been at work here all the time: Doom, Fate, Destiny, the Writhing Finger (the finger, in any case), merciless and inexorible, especially in dealing with Moulton’s Movies. Could it be that I’ve been more than just an innocent dialogue coach or player? Could I actually be a kind of Hoodoo, a certified, fully qualified Plague-Carrier, a Jonah, not so much a charmer as a Bad-Charm? Nowadays, with every other magazine speculating on who will be named Man/ Woman/ Newsmaker/ Personality of the Century/ Millenium, I have decided to go public myself. I am hereby putting myself up for Film-Pariah of the Century, the only completely surefire Jinx of the well-loved Silver Screen, a certain guarantee of disaster. To think of it, the fortune I could have been making all these years, just having people pay me for NOT being in their films, or conversely, having more vindictive souls subsidize me to be in the films of people they hated and whom they deliberately wanted to sabotage. All very simple, very orderly and lethally effective. What we’re talking here is motion-picture-stuff, cinema losses and wasted celluloid, empty theaters with idle ushers and usherettes, unsold pocorn and unswept washrooms, box offices gone to dust and conwebs, with pyramids of unwanted soft drink tins and purtrifying Chicken McNuggets. What we’re talking here is the dreaded Herbie-Factor, Folks --- Moulton’s Midas-Touch-in-Reverse. Call me Ishmael; Shake Hands with the Ancient Mariner ... and the envelope, please ... The first movie I was ever involved in that actually gave me a proper --- well, fairly proper --- speaking role was a little number entitled Attack Squadron. It was shot in less than a week in November 1961 at Ardmore Studio in Bray, Co. Wicklow, a few miles from the coast from Dublin, where I was living and working at the time. If nothing else, it offered proof positive that the human spirit is truly indestructible. Attack Squadron was set on a fictitious U.S. Navy cruiser during World War II and was the brainchild of an aging Hollywood Hot-Shot left over from the 1940’s by the name of Cy Knapp: producer/ director/ undertaker, a real Renaissance-Man. He was also Central Casting’s idea of a Hollywood eccentric, from the baseball cap and tennis shoes to the well-chomped cigar-butt and raspy Edward G. Robinson bark. Our first meeting, a casting session of sorts, took place in the only hotel open in Bray at that time of year, and was constantly interrupted by Knapp’s expansive “I’m having lunch with Herb Moulton here.” Fine, except that he was the one having lunch, while I had to make do with a cold cup of coffee, which, if memory serves, I ended up paying for myself. Of course, I took the damn job, no matter how miserably it paid (Cy Knapp could easily have been Dickens’ original model for Old Scrooge). It might be a good experience (Oh, that most amorphous of terms!) and it might also provide us with a few laughs and a bit of gas (Dublinese for fun). One could always use a bit of gas. Well, we got gas all right, but it was produced by the bill of fare at the studio canteen. Misery loves company, so they say, and mine was shared with a half-dozen or so other castaways --- Irishmen trying to sound American and Americans trying to be John Wayne gung-ho. This cross-section of the old “Race-Creed-or-Color”-syndrome featured a San Francisco-actor and manager named Jack Aronson, who recently immolated himself on a tour of southern Ireland with Moby Dick in the open-stage adaptation by a friend of his, Orson Welles. Many of us in this current gig had also been aboard the doomed, imaginary Pequod as it foundered and finally sunk, leaving the survivors to contemplate the possible existance of a genuine Cap’n Ahab Curse. That Moby Dick misadventure is worth a paragraph of its own. It was a very modern, scaled down production that relied on quick changes, recorded sound, invisible props, and energetic, not to say hysterical miming on the part of all hands. At one point-of-call, the audience consisted of two bewildered farmers in the front row, who took all the miming and shouting with stoic patience up to the point where we were all pulling on an invisible rope (“Pull, babes! Pull, sucklings! Pull! Pull!”) Whereupon one of them said aloud to his mate, “Arrah, what in the name of Jayzuz are they at? Sure, there’s fook-all there!” With that, they arose, put on their caps, and left. You see what I mean about a Curse? In this case, it might easily have been the dreaded Curse of the Seven Snotty Orphans of Dublin. Moreover, as the fella said, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” To return now to our Race-Creed-or-Color cross-section --- Jack Aronson played the ship’s Commander, who also happened to be Jewish. Horrible Herb here, the Illinois pariah, was cast as O’Brien, devout Irish-Catholic bead-roller --- the religious element was absolutely essential --- while the color part --- Canada-Lee-“Lifeboat”-damage --- was supplied by a delightful black American named Ferry, who had been snagged for the assignment while passing through. It was a horrendous time for us all, a week that truly tried men’s souls, with Cy Knapp ever more obsessed with cutting expenses, and the entire workforce of Ardmore sniggering behind his back. (Come to think of it, Cy was giving a pretty good performance of Captain Ahab on his own.) To add to my own weight of woe, I was playing Leopold, the singing headwaiter in the operetta The White Horse Inn, in downtown Dublin. This naturally led to logistic problems of horrific proportions, adding to threats, recriminations, and on-set confrontations that were already raging and have since become a part of Irish Theatre Legend. The entire week was one long screaming row, with no quarter asked or given, and no one spared. In these halcyon days I was as yet unmarried --- what the Irish call Fancy-Free-and-Free-to-Fancy, and the state of my health was always a bit dicey. This led to regular eruptions of painful boils on one or the other portion of my anatomy. Naturally, my Attack Squadron installment had to show up, in glorious wide-screen Technicolor, on one side of my nose, altering all of Cy’s camera set-ups and making it necessary to film only one side of my face, like Claudette Colbert --- or, as Ferry put it, Claudette without the jugs. Kindly amnesia has blocked out all but two episodes of that strife torn week --- (1.) the sequence where each of us dis-able-bodied seamen were leaning over the ship’s railing (actually a none-too-taut rope) deep in thought of home and just spoilin’ for a flashback. For that magical effect, Cy came up with a truly ingenius idea. One of the Ardmore worker-bees crouched on the floor at our feet, holding a pan of water with a light trained on it, causing rippled reflections on each face, or, in my piteous state, in my Job-like boil. African-American, Catholic, Jewish, a touching and wonderfully multicultural essay in homesickness and patriotic sacrifice, get it? Then a quick segue into the past --- in my case, to our cut-glass, lace-curtain dining-room at home, complete to crucifix on the wall (Cy thought of everything). Nostalgia-Time, Folks, and thoughts that lie too deep for tears. It was those home-thoughts that detonated the other episode (2.) still vivid in memory, a shot heard round the Republic of Ireland, or at least the County of Wicklow. In this tender vignette (the Gospel according to Cy), I was supposed to be explaining to my little brood how it was that we American-Catholics always have suffered such heinous religious persecution in our daily lives at the hands of our bigoted non-Catholic fellow citizens. At that point the manure really hit the fan (“Bullshit! Ballocks! Balls!”) D****t, I was once a Catholic growing up in a midwest community and never for a second had I ever, ever, ever known one instance of religious prejudice, let alone persecution. It was a vicious, pernicious libel, and I refused to be any part of it. But old hot-shot Knapp, for the sake of dramatic tension, begged to differ. Tension? Differ? While O’Brien here and Cecil B. DeKnapp wrangled loud and furious, the cast and crew took themselves off to the canteen for an attentuated tea-break. I recall, at one juncture, our make-up-girl Maureen repairing my streaming mask and my painfully blossoming boil, whilst murmuring. “Keep it up, Herb, for as long as you can! We’ll run overtime and he will have to pay us for an extra day, the bloody old gomshyte!” Finally, to break the deadlock and get me to the stage in time, a compromise was reached, the defamatory diatribe toned down, and filming allowed to continue --- the filming and the austerity. By then, ever the kleenex and the paper were all being recycled. How we got through to the end of the week remains a mystery inside of a miracle. I only know that for myself it was Schizoid City, what with juggling Leopold the Alpine Lover in town and O’Brien of the Boils down in Bray, and shuttling back and forth on the coastal train or occasional studio-van loudly begrudged by our gracious and generous Renaissance-Man. One of the few joyous moments of the whole devastating experience came with Ferry’s cheery wrap-up: “I hear that Cy Knapp’s next epic is gonna be The Nine Commandments. He’s leaving one commandment out: Thou shalt not steal.” Dear Ferry --- I wonder whatever became of him. Even more to the point: whatever happened to Attack Squadron and old Cy Knapp? Picture it: Dublin 1961, Jack Aronson, dynamic actor-director son-in-law of the great Irish actor-manager Anew MacMaster, over from San Francisco, to play the ship’s commander of, not one, but two doomed enterprises: Moby Dick’s Pequod, and Attack Squadron’s USS Anonymous --- with rugged fellow-seaman Airbear M. complete with beard for the shipwrecks ahead. Ah, Golden Days! Anchors Away! Note: in the text, Cy’s last name has been changed in the unlikely event that the old hot-shot is still alive.