"The Devil's Mistress" Comes Home

When I arrived here in August 1969, I immediately became friends with three very creative gentlemen: playwright and actor Mark Medoff, poet Keith Wilson, and filmmaker Orville (“Buddy”) Wanzer. Sadly, all three have left us.

Keith, portrayed his native New Mexico in magical poetry. He and his wife Heloise were the center of a warm and lively poetry scene here for decades. His Collected Poetry is a fine poetic exploration of New Mexico. 

Mark was a talented writer and charismatic actor, who continued to grow as a playwright and a person. We recently saw Mark's last play, Time and Chance. A week later, we heard his delightful granddaughter, Grace Marks, sing and play guitar. I'd have liked to congratulate Mark on both; but he died in April.

Buddy taught film, and for decades (with John Hadsell) ran the Film Society, an oasis where folks could see great international films. Today, we're so used to Netflix,TCM, Hulu and YouTube it's hard to imagine how isolated we were then. There weren't even videos to rent. 

In 1965, Bud made a feature, The Devil's Mistress, which was distributed nationally. Back then, all feature films in the U.S. came from Hollywood. Newspapers around the nation ran the AP story on the professor making a film in the desert. 

Don't be put off by the poster!

Shooting with local actors and crew, he did a hell of a job. It wasn't a great film, but it was a fairly original concept. Making such a film, working essentially alone, was almost heroic. 

It was a big deal here. Local actors, local investors, and a packed premiere at the Rio Grande. Fast-talking distributors ripped off the locals so badly that they got no money back. In 1969, Bud didn't even have a copy of the film. (One morning, leafing through film-rental catalogues, I spotted The Devil's Mistress. Bud rented it and illegally copied it.)

Bud was a fun, informal, and iconoclastic teacher. People still tell me how greatly he affected their lives. Some of his film-making students had film careers in Kuwait or India, some became network sports personnel, and others independent film-makers and photographers. Some also taught. 

In 1984, when Bud planned to retire, we bought some land in Derry. Working alone, he built a little house, using only materials he took there in his Datsun. He lived there 29 years, enjoying his solitude and creativity. People still read, and discuss on-line, his enviro-fantasy novel The Elfin Brood; and whenever I see stained-glass for sale it looks like child's play compared to Bud's work. He also had to build or repair most everything. He fell off the roof at an age when doctors would have forbade him to be up there. Eventually, he moved back to town, and later into Good Sam's.

Native New Mexican Julia Louisa Smith teaches film at CMI. When she learned of Bud's work, she started a documentary by interviewing him a few times before he died in February, and has continued the project. She calls The Devil's Mistress (which never was a conventional western!) an “acid western.” She showed it in Shanghai. She's intrigued that he created a local community of film-makers, way before CMI. (It's interesting to see a piece of my youth through her educated eye.)

Film Las Cruces and the LC Film Festival will show The Devil's Mistress at 7 p.m. this Thursday at the Rio Grande Theater. A reception, at nearby 575, will follow.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 1 December 2019, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and on KRWG's website.  A spoken version is available on KRWG's website and will air during the week both on KRWG and on KTAL, 101.5 FM (www.lccommunityradio.org).]

[You can get tickets for the film showing at the door, or in advance through Eventbrite , which you can also reach through the Rio Grande Theater's website [https://www.riograndetheatre.org/rio-grande-theatre-calendar/] by clicking on "The Devil's Mistress then on "Tickets." ]

[At the showing, Julia will talk a bit about the film and show a bit of her documentary-in-progress.  Ted Gregory, who was one of the film's stars and probably worked on it as a cinematographer too, may also speak briefly.]

[btw, if you google the film (and the IMDb listing is minimal and a bit inaccurate), two more films since 1965 have used that inviting title.  In one, the lady is Joseph Goebbels's mistress just before WWII, and the other is set against the background of the English Civil War.  Down at the bottom, though, is "Devil's Mistress 1965.  So in Advanced Search, add 1965 or Wanzer as additional required words.]

Teachers, Actors, Time

Late one sunny August afternoon as I drove across campus, watching returning students wave to old friends, it was hard not to recall another August when I was one of them. 1969. I’d driven here from New York to resume my education, after two years working with kids in Harlem and driving a cab.

That first semester I took film-making classes with Orville "Bud" Wanzer, a New York City cop’s son shooting films and photographs in the desert.

I took a poetry workshop with Keith Wilson, a bearded fellow who mixed his New Mexico roots, his Korean War service, and a bit of shamanism into a unique poetic brew.

I also took a fiction-writing workshop with a charismatic young fellow from Miami. He held the class in an open area on the second floor of Corbett Center, where there were a couple of couches, a few chairs, and a decent carpet to sit on. When old Herschel Zohn staged War and Peace on campus, this young writing instructor played Andrei. Very effectively, as I recall.

He was also an athlete. Immediately we started playing tennis twice a week. He had a devastating left-handed spin serve. My memory may exaggerate this, but it feels as if he won every set at love.

We also played in a Sunday touch football game that was competitive enough that a couple of Aggie wide-receivers joined us now and then; and our softball team won campus championships. Slow-pitch. One year we signed up for the fast-pitch league too. We had no fast-pitch pitcher. So we played with our regular guy lobbing up slow ones, while we hit against guys throwing hard. Even so, we went deep into the playoffs. And had a lot of fun.

Our youthful selves grow stronger and more graceful with the years, as x-rays of our knees start looking like junkyards littered with rusted parts of unknown origin.

In 1972, I went to the New York opening of "When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?" by my old fiction instructor, Mark Medoff.

Last weekend at the Community Theatre, we saw "When you Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?" Directed by the playwright. Well-acted, and as engaging as it was forty years ago – except that this time, before the play started, they showed slides from the late 1960's and early 1970's. Some members of the audience (and cast) hadn’t been born yet. At one point a character says, sarcastically, that it might take $50 to fill up a Cadillac with gas, whereas today we all wish we could fill the tank for so little.

So now the play is also a piece of the past.

Past and present mingle more and more these days.

Before supper and the play we visit Bud Wanzer, now 81. His mind’s sharp, but he can’t move around too well. (He retired in 1984, moved up to our land on the river, built a solar-powered home, and lived alone there until a few months ago, making beautiful stained-glass pieces enjoyed mostly by his five dogs.) When I stop at Milagro’s to buy a brownie for Bud, the owner responds with a special smile when I tell him whom it’s for. He took two memorable film-making classes with Bud just before he went to ‘Nam.

We have supper with Heloise Wilson (Keith’s widow) and Grant and Tenya Price, who arrived in Las Cruces the same month I did, and immediately became my close friends. Grant, who also played in those Sunday touch football games, is wearing a very faded T-shirt commemorating the opening of the play – forty years ago, when he and David Apodaca built the set. (Another of the Sunday football players was Bill Diven, whose younger brother Bob designed the excellent set for the present production.)

I tell Heloise that twice recently, when a man learned in conversation that I knew Keith and Heloise, he grew emotional telling me how much Keith had helped and inspired him. I’ve seen similar glows on the faces of folks telling me about poetry workshops they took with Joe Somoza, ten or twenty years ago.

I marvel at the many lives these teachers and artists have affected over the years, sometimes deeply. Keith has left us. So has John Hadsell, who helped start the community theater, helped start Mark on his career, and worked with Bud to initiate and run for decades the Campus Film Society.

It’s neat to see Medoff still working creatively and mentoring other writers and actors – and that students like those I saw that day in August will study in a building named for Mark and Stephanie.

More compelling is the legacy that Mark and the others have left living in the heads and hearts of men and women who write or act better, or live better, or feel better, because of them.
                                                             -30-
[The column above appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News this morning, Sunday, 30 September. ]