Way back in March when I returned to New York from my stint overseas, a friend of mine loaned me “Hawks on Hawks” by Joseph McBride, a book-length collection of interviews with Howard Hawks, who’s probably my all-time favorite director. It’s hard not to have a macho kind of respect for a director that spins these kinds of tales to his biographer.
On the subject of a dispute he once had with Howard Hughes over a scene in Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels,” Hawks said: “So he got his writer to go to my secretary and offer her two hundred dollars for the script. She told me about it and I had a couple of detectives hiding in her closet. When the guy offered her the money, they said, ‘You’re under arrest.’ Hughes called me and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got that writer of mine in jail.’ And I said, ‘You son of a bitch, he’ll stay there.’”