John McCormick

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The Hustler

John McCormick
Bums play pool, gentlemen play billiards. I noticed it the minute I lit in Chicago. The pool tables were either in the back of the room, or in the basement, so that the pool players wouldn‘t bother the billiard players. If you walked in a joint needing a shave, they......
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Soul Mates

John McCormick
Like many writers, Gavin Lambert was originally drawn to Los Angeles to work in the movies. Once here, he made his lifelong passion for film and particularly Hollywood the focal point of his work, writing fiction, screenplays and biographies. For close to five decades he has written eloquently about this......

A Bird in the hand

John McCormick
All my life I wanted to get to a place where I never had to get out of bed. In January 1998, I got my wish. I was supine in the bone-marrow-transplant unit of City of Hope. A little case of CML leukemia. Lying there, I frequently looked out the......

Back to Bataan

John McCormick
On 30 January 2000 at 8:38 p.m., I listed a 45 rpm record by a band called the Maids on eBay. I included photographs of the front and back of the paper sleeve and the following description: The Maids were a short-lived Berkeley garage band that had a minor reputation......
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Hoop Dreams

John McCormick
Photo by James Keyser Ian Frazier cut his professional teeth writing humor pieces for The New Yorker. Since the publication of Dating Your Mom in 1986, he has migrated to essay writing on subjects as diverse as Héloise (yes, that Héloise) and Charles Manson’s hideout in Death Valley. He has......

Dog Ma

John McCormick
AT 5 p.m. on a Wednesday evening, a Ford Ranger outfitted with a camper shell pulls into the parking lot at the Baldwin Park Animal Shelter. Ardis Munck, a fit, energetic, 40-ish woman with a crown of gray-flecked dark curly hair, emerges from the truck talking on a cell phone......
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True Wit

John McCormick
Photo by Slobodan DimitrovBILLY WILDER (BORN SAMUEL WILDER ON JUNE 22, 1906) started writing film scenarios in Berlin in 1929. Five decades later he was still at it, an undisputed master of the medium. In the U.S. alone, he wrote and directed 25 films, winning six Academy Awards along the......