Some years ago, purely for work purposes, I visited a “cult TV convention” at a hotel in Solihull, where the fans at the bar were all dressed as Klingons and Peter Tork from the Monkees hosted an unruly pub quiz. Parked at a table, the B-movie actor John Saxon signed souvenir headshots for £10 a time. Saxon was in attendance thanks to his roles in Falcon Crest, Dynasty and The Six Million Dollar Man, but the indignity of the occasion showed on every line of his face. “I once made a movie with Marlon Brando,” he explained with a sigh.
Had the road forked, it could all have been different. Midway through Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino mentions Saxon as one of his early choices to play Max Cherry, the careworn bail bondsman in the 1997 film Jackie Brown. While the part eventually went to Robert Forster, another B-movie mainstay, this casual aside hints at an alternative history, a parallel track. Indirectly, it reminds us that movies are serendipitous, defined as much by rewrites, casting coin-flips and crowd reaction as they are by any singular auteurist vision. Jeff Bridges almost starred in Taxi Driver. Steve McQueen was nearly the Sundance Kid. Every film – great or small – carries the ghosts of the films that it might have been.
