:03:01
On the right is Julio López,
who changed his name to Perry Lopez
:03:05
and became a busy B-movie star
and A-movie character actor.
:03:08
He played Jack Nicholson's former
partner Escobar the cop, in Chinatown.
:03:13
So here they all are at this party at Orson
Welles' home. Just four of them, I think.
:03:17
And Figueroa somehow gets onto the
subject of a real-life half-man half-fish
:03:21
that lives in the Amazon river,
near a village.
:03:24
According to Figueroa, once a year it
comes out of the river to claim a maiden,
:03:27
and then it returns to the Amazon
and the village is safe for another year.
:03:31
Everybody stared at Figueroa, I guess.
He knew they thought he was kidding.
:03:35
He started gettin' worked up,
insisting that it was true
:03:38
and people who live on the Amazon
talk about it all the time.
:03:41
He said he'd once seen a photograph of
the monster and he could get a print of it.
:03:46
Notice the little rubber pinkie claw,
instead of scratching the sand, just bends.
:03:51
For about five minutes Figueroa
talked about this half-man half-fish
:03:55
that he said was not a myth,
that actually existed.
:03:58
I have no idea whether he was on the
level or not, or if anybody believed him,
:04:03
but I know that little anecdote got lodged
in the back of William Alland's brain.
:04:07
Ten years later, Alland landed a job as a
movie producer at Universal-lnternational.
:04:12
He made a lot of westerns early on, and
a Tony Curtis Arabian Nights sort of thing
:04:15
called The Prince Who Was a Thief.
All moneymakers but not world-shaking.
:04:20
Interrupting myself, here's an example of
how movies go together like big jigsaws.
:04:25
This is a shot of a speedboat crossing the
waters of Portuguese Bend in California,
:04:29
shot September 30, 1953.
:04:33
Now we're on the process stage
at Universal, a month later, October 29.
:04:37
But the background image
on the process screen
:04:39
was shot at Portuguese Bend
on October 5.
:04:45
And now we're 2500 miles east,
:04:47
beneath the surface of Wakulla Spring
in Florida, on October 14.
:04:51
So this little nothing scene
was shot in three different places,
:04:54
on four or more different days,
two different directors,
:04:58
and the three characters were played,
or "represented", I should say,