John Carpenter Revisited: ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Art by Christopher Shy (www.artofronin.com)

After THE FOG, John Carpenter went to work on the second film in a two-film deal with Avco-Embassy.  His original plan was to write a film based on a 1979 book called The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, based on an urban legend about a WWII Navy destroyer that disappeared into a mysterious fog near a Philadelphia shipyard and magically reappeared, seconds later, in a shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia—about 300 miles away.  The director was intrigued by the story setup, but couldn’t figure out the 3^rd act payoff.  In 1999, he told interviewer Erik Bauer that his failure to make the story work “spooked” him on writing for a while.  As a result, he went back to a script he’d written years earlier, and hired his friend Nick Castle to help tune it up.  That script was a dystopian thriller called ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.

Carpenter says he wrote the original draft of ESCAPE in 1974, and that it was inspired by the films DEATH WISH (1974) and DIRTY HARRY (1971), as well as Harry Harrison’s pulp sci-fi novel Deathworld (1960).  (In a 2010 appearance at The Egyptian theater in Los Angeles, he explained the Deathworld influence: “This guy has been sent to this planet and it’s the most evil place in the universe.  So who do you get to go in?  The most evil guy.”) The finished film also pays homage to the filmmaker’s favorite genre.  In my book The Quick, The Dead and the Revived, I contextualize ESCAPE as a hybrid urban western and futuristic western—sort of a missing link between FORT APACHE: THE BRONX (1981) and THE TERMINATOR (1984).  All I’m trying to say with these comparisons is that ESCAPE is an exceptionally eclectic film.

I first saw ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK on VHS, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it because I’d never seen anything quite like it before.  It was an action movie, sure, but it was also a science-fiction movie.  And not the usual kind of science-fiction movie that’s built around projections about the future, especially future technology.  No, this was a science-fiction movie that seemed to be about regression rather than progression—about a “deathworld” where idealists can only dream backwards.  Such films had been made before, but mostly in the early 70s before the science-fiction genre was usurped by feel-good blockbusters like CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and STAR WARS (both 1977).   MAD MAX (1979) is the only exception I can think of at the moment.  Mostly I’m thinking of earlier films.

In particular, SOYLENT GREEN comes to mind—and that’s a fitting comparison to Carpenter’s film, because it was based on a novel written by Harry Harrison.  Harrison’s novel (Make Room! Make Room!) and SOYLENT GREEN are both about a fatigued world where natural resources have nearly been exhausted by the burgeoning human population.  Harrison’s 1966 novel is set in 1999, when the projected world population is 7 billion.  (Today, the world population is roughly 7.5 billion—but those of us who live in a first-world country don’t have the problems that the people in the novel have.)  If you’ve seen SOYLENT GREEN—or if you’re a SIMPSONS fan—you know what the most provocative solution to those problems is: future world leaders have secretly adopted Jonathan Swift’s “modest proposal.”  The film is pretty grim, lacking even the satirical humor of Swift’s essay.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is equally grim, but it’s also fun and funny.  A dour introductory voiceover tells us that the domestic crime rate has risen 400%, prompting authorities to turn the island of Manhattan into a fortress prison with only one rule: “You can check in, but you can’t check out.”  In real-life 1997 America, this seemed pretty silly.  Violent crime got plenty of attention in the news media in the 1990s, but crime stats overall were way down during the Clinton presidency.  Teenagers like me didn’t know much about the contrasting reality of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when President Nixon was elected and then re-elected on a campaign promise to solve America’s urban crime crisis. 

It was within that cultural context that DIRTY HARRY and DEATH WISH were made.   The violent crime rate didn’t start declining significantly until the early 1990s, but incarceration numbers rose significantly during the Reagan years—so Carpenter’s story idea remained timely when the film was made.  In 2017, I guess it’s timely again… now that we have another president who campaigned hard on “war against crime” rhetoric.  (Nevermind that crime rates in America are still very low, compared to the 60s and 70s.  Trump lives in his own fantasy world….) 

Regardless, I’d argue that the dystopian vision of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK isn’t what made the film resonate for viewers in 1982, or what makes it resonate for viewers today.  What makes Carpenter’s film endure, I believe, is the humorous irreverence embodied in the central character.  I’d be very curious to know how much Snake Plissken evolved in John Carpenter’s imagination from 1974 to 1982.  Was the humor always there or did much of the humor come from actor Kurt Russell? 

Today, it’s impossible to think of anyone other than Kurt Russell in the role of Snake Plissken—but apparently, the suits at Avco-Embassy initially wanted Charles Bronson.  It’s not hard to understand their reasoning: In 1981, Charles Bronson had a lot more marquee value than Kurt Russell.  Carpenter couldn’t have been completely averse to the possibility of casting Bronson, since he did after all write ESCAPE as a personal response to the Bronson vehicle DEATH WISH.  In the end, he fought for Kurt Russell, but imagine this….

Charles Bronson in DEATH WISH

A version of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK made with old-timey westerners.  Charles Bronson as Snake Plissken, Lee Van Cleef as Hauk, Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie, Warren Oates as Brain, maybe Jack Palance or Lee Marvin as the Duke of New York, Raquel Welch as Maggie….  In 1974, such a film might have been possible.  After HEAVEN’S GATE drove the final nail in the western genre’s coffin, not so much.  What we got instead of a 70s anti-western featuring western icons was an alternately romantic and anti-romantic 80s action movie featuring a growing stable of John Carpenter players.

The director fought for Kurt Russell partly, he says, because he was intimidated by Bronson, and partly because he knew Russell was a pro.  (They director and actor had worked together previously on the underrated 1979 TV movie ELVIS.)  Carpenter then filled out the supporting cast with other actors he knew and trusted.  He made exceptions for Van Cleef (because he was a big fan of Roger Corman’s IT CONQUERED THE WORLD) and Borgnine, and Oates was almost cast as Brain (according to C. Courtney Joyner’s book The Westerners), but the rest of the cast belongs firmly to Carpenter’s world. 

Donald Pleasence, of course, had already turned in a career-reviving performance in HALLOWEEN.  Carpenter claims he subsequently cast Pleasence in ESCAPE because of his turn as an unlikely victim in Roman Polanski’s CUL DE SAC, but it’s worth noting that Pleasence also had some western movie cred.  In fact, one year after working with Polanski, he played one of the nastiest western movie villains I can think of—opposite SOYLENT GREEN star Charlton Heston, in the 1967 movie WILL PENNY.  

That’s the movie that I decided to pair with ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK when I re-watched it this week.  It would have been just as relevant to program TRUE GRIT (the inspiration for Snake Plissken’s eye patch), BIG JAKE (another late-era John Wayne vehicle, and the inspiration for the recurring “I heard you were dead” gag in ESCAPE), or A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (Kurt Russell is obviously doing a blatant Man With No Name impression in ESCAPE, mimicking what Clint Eastwood reportedly referred to as his “Marilyn Monroe voice.”)  WILL PENNY was made around the same time as all of these films, when traditional westerns were on life support and the “American nightmare” was seeping into pretty much all genre films.

For the first two acts of the film, WILL PENNY is an old-fashioned romantic western about an upright hero in conflict.  The third act changes everything.  For a while, the story is completely dominated by Donald Pleasence’s savage lunatic preacher.  I don’t want to ruin it for those who haven’t seen it, so let me just say that in some ways the film never recovers from the savagery that Pleasence brings to the fore.  In that respect, WILL PENNY is indicative of the increasing brutality and nihilism of 70s westerns (or, rather, anti-westerns).  This film is part of a little-celebrated subgenre of westerns that I think of as horror westerns.  I wrote about this group of films at length in my western book, so I’m not going to rehash it all here.  Suffice it to say that these are films where the classical romance of the western genre gives way to the culture of fear.

To bring the trail back to Carpenter: In a May 1997 article, the filmmaker reflected on his love for the comparatively old-fashioned TRUE GRIT, saying, “[My films were] part of a darker movement but I kind of had a foot in this lighter age.  I miss that.  It’s a difficult time right now.”  Although it was made two years before TRUE GRIT, WILL PENNY belongs to the darker age.  It’s no coincidence that Charlton Heston followed up with an unofficial trilogy of apocalyptic science fiction movies (PLANET OF THE APES, THE OMEGA MAN and SOYLENT GREEN).  America was undergoing a profound transformation during those years—and there was no going back.  A supporting character in SOYLENT GREEN, living in the squalor of 2022, wistfully remembers the bygone world of his youth: “People were always rotten, but the world was beautiful.”

Set photography by Kim Gottlieb-Walker (www.lenswoman.com)

You might wonder if Snake Plissken remembers that beautiful world.  I think he does.  I think that’s where all of the character’s rage—and all of his power—comes from.  In the end of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, he damns the already-bleak future in the same way that others (including Donald Pleasance’s jackass president) have damned the past.  It’s poetic justice. 

That’s right, Snake Plissken is a fucking romantic poet. 

One final thought: While re-watching ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK this week, I couldn’t help thinking about thematic similarities to George Romero’s LAND OF THE DEAD.  Fittingly, there’s a supporting character in ESCAPE (played by Frank Doubleday) named “Romero,” a tribute to Carpenter’s fellow master of horror. Like Snake Plissken—and most of the other major characters in the film—Romero a character who, instead of being driven to despair by a crazy world, embraces craziness and draws power from it.  In the end, I think that’s what makes the films of John Carpenter (and the films of George Romero) both pensive and exhilarating.  

George A. Romero (1940 - 2017)

The first time I saw NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was on a cheap, grainy Goodtimes video purchased from K-Mart.  I was about ten years old, and I had no idea what I was getting into.  The movie kept me spellbound from beginning to end.  When I said that to George Romero years later, he didn’t believe me—because he believed that the film’s power derived entirely from the cultural context in which it was produced, a cultural context that existed a full decade before I was even born.  I tried to explain my love for his first movie, remembering how I watched it repeatedly as a teenager.

When I was about fourteen, I upgraded my VHS copy to the double-tape 25^th Anniversary Collector’s Set.  The second tape was an unedited, roundtable discussion with Romero, co-writer John Russo, and producers Russ Streiner and Karl Hardman.  In those days before bonus features were taken for granted, it felt like meeting the filmmakers.  I remember I got that anniversary edition for Christmas from a girl at school who liked me.  My best friend told her that the way to my heart was through horror movies.  (So true.)  

Later, I remember talking my dad into bringing home a big screen / projector from work so that I could watch the movie in more cinematic fashion.  I must have done that at least a dozen times.  Somehow, the grainy image and tinny sound just seemed to work better with a big screen.  I’ve always felt that watching NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is like receiving a transmission from deep space.  The medium may be weak, but the message comes through loud and clear.

I had read about DAWN OF THE DEAD before I ever saw it—in VHS guides, and in Stephen King’s nonfiction book Danse Macabre.  When I finally watched the movie on video late one night, I thought it was the bleakest thing I’d ever seen.  Somehow, the garish colors and slapstick humor made it even more melancholy than NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.   Then came DAY OF THE DEAD.  I saw it for the first time at home alone, in the early hours of a blizzard that (soon after the movie ended) killed the power to my neighborhood for more than a week, and trapped me inside with my family for days.  Although DAY is arguably the most despairing of Romero’s films, there’s something about it that has always been strangely comforting to me.  By way of explanation, I can only point to the Terry Alexander character, who lives—in his own mind, anyway—on a tropical island, far from all the dehumanizing habits of modern “civilization.”

I wrote my first tribute to Romero’s Dead trilogy in college and it quickly morphed into a chapter in my first book.  The book was newly published in August 2004, when I went to meet George Romero at the Horrorfind Convention in Baltimore.  I remember that he didn’t look the way I thought he’d look.  The photos I’d seen of him, in Paul R. Gagne’s excellent book The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh, had been taken many years earlier.  Now he was slimmer, his hair was whiter, and he was wearing huge, black-rimmed, Coke-bottle glasses.  But the eyes and the smile were the same.  George Romero always radiated warmth and childlike glee.  Not what you’d expect from a guy who made his career off of the zombie apocalypse, right?  But, as anyone who ever met him will tell you, he was a big ol' teddy bear.

I nervously handed him a copy of my book, and he seemed genuinely humbled that I had written about him.  I’m not sure why; he was already a legend.  But he got flustered enough that he actually signed the wrong name on my DVD copy of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (Millennium Edition, in case you’re keeping track).  As soon as he realized what he’d done (by comparing the newly-autographed DVD to the name on the book I’d given him), he was embarrassed… which, in turn, made me feel guilty.  All I’d wanted to do was to say “thanks,” not make the guy feel guilty for anything.  I tried to slink away, but his personal assistant followed me and took down my cell number, promising to get me a newly signed copy of the DVD before the weekend was over.   I told him not to worry, that I was just happy to have exchanged a few words with one of my heroes.

The next morning, I was eating breakfast with friends in the hotel lobby when my cell phone rang.  I recognized the exchange as a Baltimore number and assumed that it was a call from a friend who was planning to meet us at the convention that day.  Instead, the voice on the other end of the line said, “Hi Joe, it’s George Romero.”  The rest of the conversation is a little fuzzy.  He apologized, repeatedly, for signing the wrong name on my DVD, and confessed that his assistant hadn’t been able to find another copy at the convention.  (No surprise—since everyone at that convention wanted a signed copy of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.)   Then the conversation turned to the subject of LAND OF THE DEAD, which was in pre-production at that time.  I don’t think I was the one who brought it up, but I sure as hell seized an opportunity.  I asked if he might need a production assistant… or a zombie extra.  He gave me his home phone number and said to call him in a few days. 

Somehow, I managed to keep the conversation going.  I told him that I was getting on a plane to India in a few days.  He jokingly asked if I was fleeing the country before the Republican convention.  I laughed and said I was going to visit a friend, but would call as soon as I got back. 

In the end, I didn’t work on LAND OF THE DEAD.   When I returned from India, I called and talked to George’s wife.  She explained that, because the production had recently moved from Pittsburgh to Toronto, they couldn’t hire any additional American cast or crew members.  So that’s as close as I ever came to being a zombie in a George Romero movie.

On the up side, I got to interview him a few years later.  When I decided to turn my first book into a documentary film, George Romero was one of the first people I contacted, and he immediately agreed to do an interview.  In April 2008, he came to L.A. for a Fangoria convention and I made arrangements to sit and talk with him for about an hour and a half.  When he rolled in to the interview, he was tired and jetlagged—but by the end, he was a live wire, laughing heartily.  One of the liveliest parts of the interview was an exchange about the Howard Hawks movie THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, a childhood favorite that he insisted was “all about opening doors.” My documentary editor subsequently turned it into one of the most memorable segments of the doc.

Sometime later, I ran across a passage in a book on Howard Hawks that reminded me of the exchange.  The passage revealed that Romero’s observations about THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD had been shared by another remarkable filmmaker, Ernst Lubitsch.  I promptly sent George an email, which read in part:

 

A few days later, he responded with the following message:

 

It’s clear that the curious and mischievous twelve-year-old in George Romero remained alive and well throughout his life.  And it's reassuring to know that, even though the filmmaker has now disappeared behind the door, that twelve-year-old boy will continue to live on in his films—and in the hearts of all us movie geeks who love the films, and who came to love the man too.

Godspeed, George.

John Carpenter Revisited: THE FOG (1980)

Art by Cat Staggs

THE FOG is one of my favorite John Carpenter movies—partly for sentimental reasons, and partly because it is one of the most brilliantly sound-designed horror movies of all time.  To me, it’s effectively a tone poem.  I’ve already written about THE FOG in that context HERE, so I want to focus this time on the way that the film illustrates Carpenter’s development as a narrative storyteller.

According to the behind-the-scenes documentary TALES FROM THE MIST, Carpenter and his producer/co-writer Debra Hill got the idea for THE FOG during a trip to England.  According to Hill, they visited Stonehenge on a particularly overcast morning and Carpenter asked, “What do you think’s in that fog?”  Within the rhetorical question the director apparently saw an opportunity to expand on the concept of amorphous evil at the core of HALLOWEEN.  In a 1980 Cinefantastique interview, he explained, “HALLOWEEN was a haunted house story, an attempt to do a horror film which incorporates all of the devices that you would expect from a horror film.  No need for an extensive plot—just pure evil on the loose on Halloween night.  We gave the evil form, and a reason to do what it does—and just let it go from there.  On the other hand, THE FOG is a ghost story….”

NASA photo of Stonehenge

THE FOG is about—to quote the subtitle of a supernatural horrorstory collection that I remember from my youth—a fabulous, formless darkness.  It’s about fear of the unknown, in the way that the best classical supernatural horror stories are about fear of the unknown. I am thinking of British Victorian storytellers like Charles Dickens (“The Signal-Man”), Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Arthur Machen (“The Great God Pan”), M.R. James (“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”), and Henry James (The Turn of the Screw); and Americans like Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.  Carpenter is thinking of many of these same writers, especially Machen (whose name is attributed to the campfire storyteller in THE FOG), Poe (who provides an epigraph for THE FOG), and Lovecraft, whose specter is never far from the director’s mind.  In fact, Carpenter said in 1979 that his main goal for THE FOG was to suggest the same “textures” in his film that Lovecraft suggested in his weird tales. 

In an extended essay called “Supernatural Horror inLiterature” (1927), Lovecraft explained his own sensibilities: “Our contemporary horror-tales specialize in events rather than atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than the impressionistic imagination, cultivate a luminous glamour rather than a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare.  It has undeniable strength, and because of its ‘human element’ commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare.  If not quite so potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity of a concentrated essence.”

When John Carpenter set out to make THE FOG, he was going for the intensity of that “concentrated essence.”  Unfortunately, that proved to be easier said (written) than done (shown).  Lovecraft’s style of horror is pretty difficult to pull off in words, and it’s even more difficult to pull off in images.  Just think of all the film adaptations of Lovecraft’s work that have fallen short of the awesome weirdness of the source stories.  In 1979, when Carpenter was preparing THE FOG, there were only a few meager attempts by AIP: THE HAUNTED PALACE (nominally part of Roger Corman’s Poe cycle, but actually an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”), DIE MONSTER DIE! And THE DUNWICH HORROR.  There are things to enjoy about each of these films, about Carpenter has professed to being an admirer of Corman, but I’m still not convinced that any of these films provided much inspiration for THE FOG.

Carpenter has specifically cited a British monster movie called THE TROLLENBERG TERROR (a.k.a. THE CRAWLING EYE) as a major influence.  There are some similar shots of light and fog crawling underneath closed doors—along with similar emphases on elemental forces at work and a pervasive air of doom.  But I’m not convinced that TROLLENBERG was the biggest influence either.  

It seems to me that THE FOG, even more than HALLOWEEN, is a descendant of the Val Lewton tradition of horror cinema.  In 1980, Carpenter confessed as much, telling interviewer Bob Martin, “I wanted to do ISLE OF THE DEAD, or I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE.  I love Lewton’s films—they’re very shadowy, all suggestion, and he has all sorts of melodrama going.  I was a real fan of that sort of thing, and that’s the sort of movie I initially shot.”

Carpenter goes on to say, however, that his plan didn’t work.   When he reviewed his initial rough cut of THE FOG, it was flat—because, he explained to interviewer Gilles Boulenger, it lacked both mythical backstory and shocking payoffs.  The filmmaker concluded (in 1980), “We’ve come a long way since Val Lewton.  […] I don’t mean to put down Val Lewton.  I just came to a point on THE FOG where I said, ‘They have seen ALIEN, HALLOWEEN, PHANTASM and a lot of other movies.  If my film is going to be viable in the marketplace, it’s got to compete with those.’

With an admirable sense of humility and responsibility for the integrity of his film, the director went to his investors at AVCO-Embassy and told them he needed to re-think and re-shoot.  Over the years, Carpenter has listed the sequences and story elements that were added to THE FOG after principal photography—and it’s quite a list!   There’s the prologue with John Houseman telling the campfire story; the Jamie Lee Curtis character and her interactions with Tom Atkins on the Sea Grass and later in the morgue; the climactic struggle between Adrienne Barbeau and the ghost-lepers on top of the lighthouse; as well as various “visceral shocks” and a touch of crowd-pleasing gore.  Carpenter also re-recorded his own score for the film, proclaiming his first attempt “very heavy-handed.”  

Re-watching the movie this week, I took mental note of all these re-shoot scenes.  From what I can tell, the added material comprises roughly half of the final 90-minute film.  So…. What was all the material that ended up on the cutting room floor?  I should probably go back and read Dennis Etchison’s novelization of THE FOG, because novelizations often include scenes that were removed from the final cut.  (In this particular case, however, Etchison has said he based his work on a nearly-finished cut of the film, rather than on a script, so there’s probably not much to be found there.)  I vaguely remember a few dream sequences in the novelization that weren’t in the finished film… but not much else.

If that first cut of THE FOG was more Lewton-esque than the finished film, I’d like to think that maybe it was more like Jacques Tourneur’s NIGHT OF THE DEMON (a.k.a. CURSE OF THE DEMON), which is—along with Robert Wise’s THE HAUNTING—the apex of Lewton-esque horror.  Tourneur directed Lewton’s first three horror productions (CAT PEOPLE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE and THE LEOPARD MAN) and he applies everything he learned to NIGHT OF THE DEMON, creating a gorgeous expressionistic fantasy on the back of a surprisingly intellectual screenplay by Charles Bennett and Hal E. Chester (from a story by M.R. James).   

It’s worth pointing out that NIGHT OF THE DEMON begins with a voiceover (comparable to the campfire story in THE FOG) set against eerie footage of Stonehenge.  It then unfolds a narrative about belief vs. superstition.  As the story progresses, Tourneur does a remarkable job of undermining the rational hero’s—and the rational viewer’s—sense of reality.  Among movie geeks, the biggest debate is whether or not Tourneur should have shown the fire-demon onscreen, or (following Lewton’s example) left it to the viewer’s imagination. 

Night of the Demon (1957)

After his experience with THE FOG, I’m pretty sure Carpenter agrees with the decision to feature the demon…. although it’s worth adding that Tourneur’s film does so sparingly.  We see the fire-demon in the opening sequence, where it emerges from a supernatural billow of smoke and a soundscape of angry cicadas.  Then we spend the rest of the film anxiously anticipating another appearance--which doesn't happen until the final scene of the film.  As with many horror films, the climax can’t quite pay off to the build-up… but that’s just the nature of Lovecraftian—and Lewton-esque—horror (whether the filmmaker shows the monster onscreen or not).

THE FOG suffers a comparable fate.  In the end, Carpenter's film conveys the haunting beauty of the fabulous, formless darkness—although its mystique is diminished a bit by some added slasher-movie tropes.  When Blake’s party gets their “final cut,” I can't help feeling that Carpenter has completely abandoned the more subtle influences of CURSE OF THE DEMON and THE TROLLENBERG TERROR (both of which bet the farm on you’ve-got-to-see-it-to-believe-it monsters) in favor of E.C. Comics-style revenge zombies. 

As I said, I think THE FOG is a hell of a good movie—but it’s not the movie that Carpenter set out to make.  Perhaps for that reason, the director has always seemed to be a little bit disappointed with it.  As a fan of the filmmaker, however, I say it's all for the best—because it means that Carpenter kept working hard to develop his concept of amorphous evil in later films, especially the so-called Apocalypse Trilogy (THE THING, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS).  After the overwhelming success of HALLOWEEN, the director challenged himself to do something more ambitious and more difficult, instead of simply repeating what he knew worked.  Viewed within that context, THE FOG is a tantalizing prologue for things to come.  Carpenter has gathered us around the campfire to tell us about the true nature of evil.  But his story will take much longer than a single night to tell...