This is the myth-worthy saga of a low-budget movie you've never heard of, that few people have ever seen, that failed miserably both artistically and financially - and about which I have been unduly curious for half a century, because it was the first movie set I ever visited.
Stories of failure have always been fascinating to me. Partly because they don't get told nearly as often - George Lucas would much rather talk about Star Wars than Howard the Duck or Willow. But he started all those projects with a vision and a script, and nobody knew in advance which one would produce generations of progeny.
One of my biggest regrets as a journalist was that I never got to write up my Rolling Stone-sponsored visit to the set of Texasville, Larry McMurtry's sequel to The Last Picture Show, with struggling director Peter Bogdanovich returning to the scene of his 1971 triumph in 1990 - the same year Coppola was making Godfather III and screenwriter Robert Towne had written the Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes.
When laboring on the originals, those filmmakers didn't have any foresight that they would become classics; indeed, if you listen to Coppola's commentary on the Godfather DVD, he was under constant worry that he was going to be fired. And when they tried to recapture the magic two decades later, they certainly didn't set out to make thin, soulless retreads. I never wrote up my Texasville reporting, because the Rolling Stone movie critic saw an early screening and - correctly - declared it bad, and the magazine (like most) was not geared to giving space to long features on duds.
But it would have been a much more interesting story than one of a success.
Which brings me to my earliest set visit, to The Steagle, a movie released 50 years ago this month.
In early May, 1970, the cast and crew were filming at the train station in Scarsdale, my hometown, for a scene of star Richard Benjamin getting off a commuter train.
My mother, then 32 - only a year older than Benjamin! - having somehow learned about it, dragged me and my two younger brothers to the station to watch the dull, repetitive act of a train slowly arriving and a man getting off and being greeted by his wife (played by Cloris Leachman, unknown even to my fangirl mom - The Mary Tyler Moore Show wouldn't premiere until that fall, and although Leachman's performance in The Last Picture Show that would win her an Oscar had already been shot, it hadn't yet been released).
The under-10-year-old set visitors, Scarsdale RR station, May 1970
I had dutifully brought along my recently-obtained autograph book, which mostly contained New York Mets, and with my mother's nudging, obtained Benjamin's signature. As you can tell from the photo, I had no idea who he was - since his movies had all been for adults.
Me and Dick
My interest in The Steagle was recently rekindled by a Facebook post by a guy from my high school whose dad had done locations for the 1969 Benjamin movie Goodbye, Columbus, which reminded me that its tennis scenes had been shot at the Scarsdale High courts. I wondered - wait, what about that other movie Richard Benjamin shot in Scarsdale?
Even in the streaming era, The Steagle is nowhere to be found, despite the fact that Benjamin was in the peak of his career after the troika of Goodbye, Columbus, Catch-22 and Diary of a Mad Housewife.
I finally tracked down a crappy bootleg DVD. Though