I have the greatest friends in the world, none greater than my friend Miles. He avoided having a telephone for SO long, and he and I could only communicate by snail mail for decades. (Now that he’s got a phone, we connect almost weekly and “cover the waterfront,” laughing and screaming all the while.) Miles has always been a huge movie fan and continues to update his personal collection, complaining each time a new technology is introduced, forcing him to purchase once again. From videotape to DVD to Blu-Ray...he is concerned that another new format is looming on the horizon, threatening. The phone-free Miles was never shy about approaching the authorities (via US Mail) with questions he might have about gaps in his film or soundtrack library. Witness this generous reply from Rex Reed to Miles’s inquiry about why he was unable to find any soundtrack album for the film Myra Breckingridge. Do you suppose anyone else in the world was interested in this soundtrack?
I love this. Quite aside from the inside dope from Rex Reed himself on the movie, I love the way it has been touch-typed by a proper typist on a nice electric machine. You can tell it was typed by someone who knew what she was doing. All proper titles are in quotation marks. And a final quote mark is always INSIDE punctuation, not outside. Two spaces between sentences. This was old-school typing which every steno girl learned by heart -- I know I did! Okay, she fucked up the date. But she finessed it so that it hardly shows, and the rest of the letter is clean as a whistle. A good steno expected it to be clean, but nonetheless breathed a sigh of relief when she got down to "Yours truly," without a mistake. Maybe the steno was Rex, in which case she is even more talented than we had ever known -- journalists tend to be lousy typists. This letter is a time-capsule treasure!
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