Tomorrow night, I’m going to see Made in U.S.A. a 1967 film that was never released in the United States because the producers didn’t pay for the rights to “The Juggler” by Donald Westlake.  I was a huge Godard devotee and it made me think:  what are the influences that make up our lives?  Can you list ten?  I’m going to give it a shot, subject to change later

The Rolling Stones - Spent a lot of time listening and thinking about their stuff.  Still do.
Jim Morrison - The only true rock poet in my book.  His ghost still haunts Venice.
Jean-Luc Godard - I liked him probably more that I should.  The expression, “what the fuck” probably came from a reviewer of one of his movies.
James Rosenquist - A guy that nails my aesthetic.  Sign painter as fine artist.
George Jones - Like Elmore, the greatest.
Raymond Chandler - All highways lead to Ray.
Philip K. Dick - Scary cat.  He defined future noir.
Francis Ford Coppola - The Godfather Part I and II.  Any questions?
Martin Scorcese - Mean Streets and Goodfellas are enough, but there’s a lot more.
Elmore Leonard - You were expecting Herman Melville?

Top Ten most influences on why I’m screwed-up mess:

Pinocchio - The Disney film my mom took me to when I was 5. The scene of the boys smoking, turning into jackasses, instilled a fear of success.

Comic books - I was reading from the age of 5, and I advanced that skill thanks to used, discount comics my dad bought for me any time he had to run a route in Wichata Falls. Old grocery store there had piles of them.

Perry Mason - The television drama I watched with the family as a kid. Instilled in a belief of “innocent until proven guilty”. Plus, watching Mason cross-examine had subliminal effect latter in life when I did some pro se work. Too late in life to go to law school (we’ll see), but I know I was meant to be a lawyer. Siggggh.

Tarzan of the Apes - As a kid I wrote once to Johnny Wiesmiller asking for Boy’s loincloth.

Dr. Seuss - In elementary school one of our librarians would not allow me to check out books past my first grade level, and on those days the Dr. was as good a friend as there is, I guess.

Arthur Conan Doyle - Read the Sherlock Holmes stories in junior high school. None of the librarians there didn’t care what I checked out.

Edgar Rice Burroughs - Reading the actual Tarzan books about that same JHS period always made me wonder how those Tarzan movies had seemed so cool. The literary Tarzan was way better. (And oh how painful was it to watch “Grestoke, Lord of the Apes” fall apart in the second half. The first half was dead-on. And don’t get me started on the Disney version!)

Jonathan Swift/Daniel Defoe - What can I say, read a lot of books as a kid, and the “classics” these guys wrote that kids today struggle to understand I blew through with salivation.

James Jones - my first adult novel in high school. Mrs. Smith, my English teacher in Cleburne, Texas, had a wire rack stuffed with paperbacks like in a store in her classroom (an example I will follow now as a teacher). This inspired my first thoughts of actually becoming a writer some day.

Louis L’Amour - Okay, maybe not all that good a writer, but he kept my mind occupied, doing something after dropping out of high school. And there is a “will do” spirit that is the theme of all his books that can be an asset for anyone.

Stephen King/Harlan Ellison - Okay, both may be show-off writers, but they can spin a yarn.

Robert B. Parker - His Spenser series actually made me sit down and create my own PI - one that can’t cook for shit and thinks “Spenser” is misspelled. I just wasn’t quite there yet.

Elmore Leonard - A whole ‘nother world.

Jack Betz Smith - My dad. Told me late in his life how he’d written westerns while working a gas station right before WW II got started. Man, I do wish he had saved them. He didn’t say much, but was pretty cool when he did.

Hey, you think if there had only been ten I would be a little more focused in life?????

Chronologically:

Willie Mays
Cassius Clay
The Beatles
Bob Dylan
Hunter Thompson
Magic Johnson
Elmore Leonard
Robert DeNiro
Tiger Woods
Barack Obama

Honorable Mention:

Chuck Berry
Jack Nicholson
Charles McCarry
Gerry Spence

(iPhone post; terse of necessity)

In no particular order..

Elmore Leonard (in my writing)
Jim Thompson (in my writing)
H.P. Lovecraft
Philip K Dick (in my writing)
Joy Division (as a teenager)
David Lynch
William Burroughs
Carlton Mellick III
Richard Stark/Westlake
The Karate Kid (as a child)

In no particular order

Mike Tyson—My boyhood idol. Could’ve been the greatest of all time. Say what you want about the man, but he’s a survivor. And I can’t imagine how hard it was for him to adjust from being a street punk from Brooklyn to the ‘baddest man on the planet’ at 20 years old. What a life. By the way, there’s a upccoming documentary about Tyson, directed by James Toback, that’s getting a lot of ‘buzz’ at Sundance. 

The Black Crowes—My favorite band, the baby Rolling Stones if you will (except better, in my opinion). So overlooked throughout the years. They’ll get their due someday. But can you think of another band that debuted in 1990 that can still fill concert halls?

David Chase—Creator of The Sopranos, the best television show of all time.

Charles Bukowski-Because he just didn’t give a fuck.

Hunter Thompson—Becaues anything worth doing, is worth doing right.

The Blues—Muddy, Howlin Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Little Walter, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Otis Spann, John Lee Hooker, etc.

Jerry Lee Lewis—Man’s been through hell and back. I love his country records from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Canibus—A man needs his medicine, don’t he?

My Dad—For showing me how much alcoholism can cripple a family.

John Sinclair

I’ve got a lot of respect for professionals and especially the ones that achieve what they’re after, whatever field they’re in.

A guy named Malcolm Gladwell has a book out now called Outliers which is basically profiles of really successful people. One of the things he claims they have in common is that no matter what natural abilities they were born with, no matter what opportunities of birth they had and no matter what great luck they had, they all put in the hours. He pegs it at about 10,000 hours - usually a lot more than the people around them. Lennon and McCartney figured they wrote 300 songs before they ever recorded one.

Made me think of Elmore Leonard’s “million words,” to find your own voice as a writer.

Anyway, one of Gladwell’s examples is The Beatles. He claims that before they ever recorded a single song they’d performed over 10,000 hours. All those trips to Hamburgh, in addition to the nights at the rock’n'roll clubs, they played all weeek, eight hour shifts in strip clubs, whatever songs the dancers wanted. Then, for a year they were the house band on a TV show and backed-up whichever singer was coming through town. On that show they also played requests, whatever was on the charts at the time.

The book also talks about Tiger Woods and how from the age of three he hit golf balls everyday. Not because his father made him, because he wanted to. It’s like story of Wayne Gretzky, his father made a rink in the backyard and Wayne played on it everyday from the minute he got home from school till it was time for bed. An interviewer once asked Walter how he made his son to practise everyday and he said, “Made him? I couldn’t stop him.” (if only he could have stopped him from coaching)

Okay, so they were all influences for me.

And John Sayles. Liked him from his early movies Return of the Seacacus Seven and Matewan, City of Hope and Eight Men Out, but with Lonestar he really nailed it. Writes good novels, too. I have no idea why he isn’t far more recognized as the only true independent in the movie business (my dream is to see an Elmore Leonard novel adapted by John Sayles).

Bruce Springsteen. Hey, I was fifteen when Born to Run came out and I joined the Teamsters the year of The River.

Neil Simon. The Odd Couple may be the perfect stage play. And he wrote twenty more almost as good.

William Goldman. He wrote almost the best books and movies in different genres from The Princess Bride to Marathon Man to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

I grew up in Montreal and there was a statue of Jackie Robinson outside the Big O when the Expos played there because Robinson’s first season in “white” baseball was 1946 with the Montreal Royals, but when I moved to Toronto I saw the Jays win back-to-back World Series and I have to say it was because of Cito Gaston. Sure, he had great teams, one year the Jays had the top four hitters in the American League (maybe Cito being a former hitting coach had something to do with that) but I remember both against the Phillies and the Braves (more the Braves) how the other teams’ dugout panicked more and more and Gaston was always calm and in control, the clear leader, never yelling at players or stomping around.

And the biggest influence is easily Elmore Leonard. Pretty much every review I’ve got for my novels so far has mentioned what a big influence he is on my work. Sometimes the reviews mean it as a criticism. Publishers Weekly said I have all my characters talk like Chili Palmer - they have no idea what a compliment that is.

There are more, way more, of course.

Authors :

Richard Stark/Donald E.Westlake
Robert E.Howard
Jack Vance
Philip K Dick
Jim Thompson
David Gemmell
Ross Macdonald
Raymond Chandler
Edgar Allan Poe
Alexander Dumas
Robert Heinlein

Film :

Jean-Pierre Mellville(Le Samourai)
Al Pacino
Marlon Brando
Akira Kurosawa
Sergio Leone
Bruce Lee
Jacke Chan

Others :

Muhammed Ali
Mahatma Ghandi
Louis Armstrong
Billie Holliday
Tupac Shakur

I havent been reading books for more than 4 years so i cant say those authors influenced as a kid.  Since i love reading they are most important to me.  Few persons mean as much to me as PKD and co

QUICK TOP SIX

Blood On The Tracks - Bob Dylan
Plastic Ono Band - John Lennon
Otis Redding
68 - 72 Stones
The Clash
U2 (7 Tours and counting)

Leonard
Camus
Frost
Thurber
Steinbeck
Trudeau

Amadeus
One Flew Over…
The Awful Truth
Das Boot
Let The Right One In (gots to throw something new)
Fawlty Towers

Elmore Leonard
Catcher in the Rye - I read this as a teenager.  Upon re-reading it I am astounded to realize how it influenced how I look at the world
Bob Dylan
Hunter S. Thompson
Carl Barks - Wrote and drew some of the best adventure stories of the 20th century.
Gram Parsons
Seinfeld - If I had a nickel for every time I found myself saying “there is a Seinfeld episode about that…” I would have a lot of nickels (this is really about Larry David I suspect)
Coen Brothers
Baseball - it’s my wife and it’s my life
Warren Zevon

To start at the beginning:The Selfish Gene & The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. On the other hand, The Gospel According to St Matthew; everyone’s influenced by Matthew, even if you don’t know it.

The Beatles. Paul McCartney tried to fuck up my childhood when he split the band. They should have carried on at least until the mid 70’s when The Ramones came along & reasserted the importance of stripped-down (deceptive) simplicity. The protagonists (both sides, the IRA & the Loyalists) of the Northern Irish troubles also tried to fuck up my childhood. Luckily none of these people succeeded 100%.

Stephane Mallarmé convinced me that poetry is the ultimate art form, although it was T.S. Eliot who first ignited my passion for verse. I agree with Gregg about Raymond Chandler. Chandler was midwife to the whole concept of quality genre writing (he also introduced me to the Gimlet); but it was only with Elmore that I started buying crime books in hardcovers.