Eddie Muller

We're grateful that Muller found time to talk with Pop Culture Classics about his many pursuits.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
I'm really enjoying your latest book, Eddie Muller's Noir Bar. Generally, what is the role booze has played in the realm of noir?

EDDIE MULLER:
The key thing, why there were so many great examples that I could draw on for this project, is just because, nightclubs and speakeasies and all that kind of stuff in those movies are crucial locations, because it's where legitimate society rubbed shoulders with the underworld. And so a lot of stuff goes down in the nightclubs and the bars. It's fun.

So when I'm putting the book together, people would always say, "What was your inspiration?" My inspiration is finding a photograph from the movie and they're actually drinking. And it's like, "Oh, good, I can use this picture." So that made the cut instantly, if I could find a visual reference of people drinking in these bars. That was a biggie, you know?

PCC:
The book contains some classic cocktails, as well as modern concoctions invented by various imaginative bartenders You've included fancy drinks actually consumed in various noir films, like a Stinger and a Pearl Diver. Might those not well versed in the genre have assumed the staples of noir characters would be like a shot of rye... or gin slugged from a bottle?

MULLER:
Yeah and I think that that's not incorrect. But where's the fun in that? [laughs] You could just pour yourself a shot and leave it at that.

PCC:
The new recipes of yours that you've paired with chosen films, how did you go about developing those, deciding what ingredients would complement each movie?

MULLER:
By drinking a bit too much [chuckles]. Well, like "The Crimson Kimono" was a movie that I thought, "Well, this could be kind of interesting," because if you've seen that movie, you know that there was a fair amount of drinking. Anna Lee plays a drunken artist and I say, "Okay, I know I'm going to find pictures from 'Crimson Kimono.'" Plus I'm a huge Sam Fuller fan, always have been.

And I thought this would be interesting, by virtue of the fact that it's called "The Crimson Kimono." That already sounds like a cocktail to me. And because it was a multicultural story, I said, "We can do something with Japanese whisky here, to kind of tie it into the movie." Then it just becomes the challenge of, "Well what would make sense in this drink?" And of course crimson would be like a Compari or something. And then more of the Asian influence would be like a ginger liqueur. And that was kind of how I went about.

And the same thing when I did a drink from "The Lady From Shanghai." It was like, "Well, how weird is it that Orson Welles is playing an Irishman with a really, really lame brogue." So I said, "Well, I've got to have Irish whiskey." And then I just started thinking, "What would all the other characters drink?" And then you just experiment. And you just put the stuff together and, when it works, it works. And you go, "Oh, I'd actually drink this."

I'm also a huge fan of Belita [British Olympic figure skater, dancer and actress]. I think she probably made like six movies total or something and four of them were film noir. So she's like a personal favorite of mine -- "The Ice Queen of Noir." So I said, "Well, I've got to make a frozen cocktail for Belita. It has to be frozen. And it has to somehow be blue, to look like ice, like a skating rink." And because she's British, I said, "Okay, I'm going to make gin the base spirit, because that's very British." And then you just play around with it until you come up with something that you'd actually want to drink.

PCC:
It's a very creative process.

MULLER:
It is. But that's how I created the original ones. Then it's just the research of finding cocktails that were created for actors. I was very surprised to learn that in like the 30s, there were so many cocktails created like the Joan Blondell. And there was a Joan Bennett cocktail, an Ann Sheridan cocktail, a Lee Tracy cocktail. I didn't know these existed before this project.

So that was a lot of fun, just searching those out. And there's a great website -- I should give credit where credit is due -- it's EUVS Vintage Cocktail Books [https://euvs-vintage-cocktail-books.cld.bz/]. And this was an invaluable resource. You just go to the landing page and it's like a grid and each square is a cocktail book all the way back to the 1870s. Who collected all of these? They scanned each book and put them into a PDF form that you can just flip through. It's fantastic.

You'll find recipes from all over the world. So that was an invaluable reference. That's how I found like the Lee Tracy cocktail. I browsed through this website and then I'd see like a cocktail book from Hollywood in 1934 and say, "That's interesting." I just did a lot of browsing and found recipes, made the cocktail and if the cocktail was good, it was a candidate for inclusion.

PCC:
So you devoted a lot of time to experimentation.

MULLER:
Hey man, it was Covid. [Laughs]

PCC:
As you mention in the book, mixology is an art and a science, but also should be fun.

MULLER:
Precisely. So many cocktail books -- and I have more than my fair share -- but so many of them are just kind overwhelming. It's like 300 pages of stuff. They try to be definitive and include every single cocktail you could imagine. And that was not what I wanted to do. I didn't want it to be overwhelming for people. People watch on TCM and they're not cocktail experts or anything. They just want to have fun. So that was my inspiration.

PCC:
As with "Noir Alley" and your other books, this one has lots of juicy tidbits about the films themselves. Do you find that, for viewers, having the full background really enhances the viewing of a film?

MULLER:
I thought so and certainly that idea has been reinforced by the feedback I get from people. Especially when I'm showing a movie that isn't well known at all and, quite honestly, may not be that good, if you can just talk about it and put it into context and explain interesting things about the people who made it, then it makes people less wary and defensive. They think, "Okay, I'll give this movie a shot." Then you have a cocktail with it and suddenly it's much more enjoyable that you thought it was going to be.

But I do get that a lot from people who say, "Thanks for the backstory. It made the movie so much more enjoyable." So I appreciate that. And it's not a big deal. I never try to tell people, in my intros, what to think about the movie. If they don't like it, they don't like it. If they love it, they love it. I really just try to provide some kind of context for -- Why did this movie get made? Did these people get along? What was the story behind this movie? I might say, "This movie is known for being one of the first to explore this or that" or something. But if you watch my intros and outros, I'm rarely praising the film unless I think it really deserves praise. I'm just kind of setting it up for people to reach their own conclusions.

PCC:
Yeah, you always do a great job of providing context. Even if it's a movie I've seen many times and maybe have even casually researched, I always learn something new, when listen to your intros and outros. Are you always finding new things to impart, even after you've presented a film multiple times?

MULLER:
Well, I try to do that. I guess I started in 2017. That was when "Noir Alley" began, March of 2017. I've shown some movies a couple of times and it has been a standard practice of TCM, which I love, that they don't repeat the intros. They never did that for Robert [Osborne]. Ben [Mankiewicz] doesn't do that. You always create a fresh intro. You may be imparting the same information, but maybe there's something different. Like what's happening in the world makes the movie more interesting at the time you're presenting it. So you can tie that in.

Number one, I try not to repeat films. But if I do show the same film again, I will go back and look ay my original introduction and try to change it, so that I'm not just repeating the same thing. Because as you know, these days, everything lives on, on the internet. I mean, I think every intro I've done is on YouTube now. And so people can look it up and if I do two intros for "Touch of Evil" or something, they better not be exactly the same.

PCC:
You actually worked as a bartender long ago. Did you feel like a character in a noir movie while you were doing that?

MULLER:
[Laughs] Well, honestly, no, because I didn't work in any really cool bars that would have been appropriate to the period. That was the 70s and it was a totally different kind of thing. There was no retro culture back then. Now you can find bars where you can go and the whole idea is that they are recreating that era. But that certainly wasn't the case when I was a bartender. It was just standard stuff, you know -- beer and a white wine and maybe a Harvey Wallbanger or something. You never got called on to make a Stinger or a Pearl Diver or an Angel Face. No. There was no call for those things.

I didn't work in places that were divey or mysterious bars, which is where the noir thing would have come in. I'd be lying, if I didn't say it was like, "Man, I wish I could own my own bar." I would love that. Who knows? Maybe this book will get somebody to invest in a bar.

PCC:
That would be a great idea -- a Noir Bar you could actually visit.

MULLER:
The real thing -- wouldn't that be cool?

PCC:
You're based in San Francisco?

MULLER:
Actually, the East Bay. I'm in Alameda [with his wife, Kathleen Maria Milne].

PCC:
So you fly down to L.A. occasionally to shoot all the introductions and promos?

MULLER:
Well, the set for "Noir Alley" is in Atlanta. So I actually fly to Atlanta. Most of the TCM stuff has always been done in Atlanta. That's where Ted Turner set up shop. That's where they have what they call "the campus." CNN, which was a part of Turner Broadcasting, has its own building in Atlanta. But everything else -- TBS, TNT, TCM, all those Turner things... my studio is right next to the studio where they shoot all of the basketball stuff. So when I go in, like Charles Barkley and Shaquille O'Neal will be there in the afternoon, when I'm finishing up shooting, because they're coming in to start up their evening with the basketball broadcast. I guess that's on TBS.

PCC:
So everything except what you shoot in Oakland at the old movie palace there is filmed in Atlanta?

MULLER:
Yes, Ben Mankiewicz's set is in Atlanta... Everything is in Atlanta, I guess for the foreseeable future. We'll see. I mean, Ben lives in L.A. Dave Karger lives in L.A. Jacqueline Stewart lives in L.A. I live up here in the Bay Area. And Alicia Malone lives in Maine. She moved to Camden, Maine, where they filmed "Peyton Place." So she has to go the furthest. It kind of would make sense, if it was in L.A., because it's so much closer for four of the five of us. But anyway, that's how that works.

Everything kind of changed during Covid, because we had to shoot everything at home. And then, the fellow who owns the Grand Lake Theatre [in Oakland], where I now shoot a lot of stuff, lives right across the street from me. When I was doing my show from home, he started remodeling his house. And the noise and the sound, I couldn't shoot my show at home. It was just too noisy every day. So I went over to complain to him. And he said, "Why don't you just shoot it in my theatre, since it's Covid time and nobody's coming to the movies anyway?" So that's how that worked out. So that became my secondary set.

PCC:
And a great set it is. I

MULLER:
Yeah, not bad, right? And I've just moved my Noir City Film Festival to Oakland from San Francisco.

PCC:
Back to the land of cocktails for a moment. Do you have a go-to drink?

MULLER:
Yeah, I'm a martini guy. I have a martini every day. And I make it just the way it's described in Noir Bar. The "Sweet Smell of Success" -- that's my cocktail. [With Plymouth gin as a key ingredient. Get the book for the rest of the recipe.]

PCC:
Do you get frustrated, when people make a drink all wrong -- a martini with too much vermouth for instance?

MULLER:
Well, there's not much you can do about that, because I don't want to be one of those guys who takes over the whole thing -- "This is how you have to make it, blah, blah, blah." I'm more interested in seeing how different bars and bartenders make their drinks. And if it's not good, I can still drink it [laughs]. I can still get it down somehow. But I just won't order another one. Then I'll switch to something else, if I don't approve.

But yes, you're right, that does happen [laughs], where sometimes I'm like hesitant. I confess, I sometimes go into a bar and I watch the bartender make a few drinks and then, if II don't trust them, I'll order a beer or a glass of wine [laughs], if I don't think I'm going to get a satisfying cocktail out of this person.

PCC:
You're incredibly knowledgable, yet you present from a fan's perspective, in that your passion for the work is always evident, Do you feel that's part of why audiences immerse themselves in what you're showing or writing about?

MULLER:
I do. Paul, I absolutely think that has been the key to my having this weird, unexpected career doing this stuff is because I always lead with my enthusiasm. And I try not to lecture people and tell them that this is what you need to know, this is how you have to think about this film and if you don't agree with me, you're a fool. It amazes me how many people who talk about movies have that attitude.

Like if you go on social media, it just drives me crazy to see people who will post about a movie and say, "This is the best movie ever made and if you don't think so, you're a jerk!" [Laughs] What's the value of that? From the time I started writing about movies, I have always seen my job as trying to encourage people to watch this stuff. That's the job. It's not to tell them what to think about it, necessarily. It's just to encourage them to explore it and maybe some of my enthusiasm will rub off on them. That's the way I think you have to go about this stuff. I just want people to watch.

And I think that's why TCM hired me, because they came to my film festival that I was doing and they saw for themselves, "Wow, he's attracting a pretty diverse audience and the people are really into it." My audience skews -- probably TCM won't appreciate my saying this -- but I think my audience skews a lot younger than the average TCM viewer. But also older, because I get emails all the time from people who proudly announce, "I'm 82 years old and I saw this film for the first time in Podunk, Iowa, when I was blah, blah blah." And I love all of that. But I also get an equal amount of mail from much younger people, people who are like 40 years younger than me, who are like, "Thanks for introducing me to this. I had no idea." So I think that's great.

And that's also part of the reason why I've written typical -- if you want to call them that -- film books. But this book is a little different, because I'm hoping that people who are young and into cocktails and all that stuff will see this and, who knows, maybe they don't watch old black-and-white movies, but maybe this will lead them into that.

I know that TCM hired me because, at one point, just talking to some people who worked with TCM, they said, "So you can really do this and all you focus on is film noir?" And I said, "Well, you know, film noir is the gateway drug to classic cinema, because kids will watch a film noir, where they won't watch a western or a screwball comedy or, God forbid, a silent movie. So if you can hook 'em with film noir, then once they get used to it, I think they'll expand their viewing to include a lot of other great stuff." That's what I see as my job, is convincing people that there's eternal value in these films.

PCC:
And those who are new to noir, are they sometimes surprised by the breadth of the genre -- different moods, different styles, some from different countries?

MULLER:
Yes, I think so. As for different countries, that's something that came as a bit of a surprise to me. Because, when I wrote my first book on film noir, I thought I was writing about something that was exclusively American. And then, once I created the Film Noir Foundation, what was happening was, I started programming film festivals and I'd ask studios for a print of something and they'd go, "No, we don't have a print of that." And that's when the alarm bells went off and I thought, "How can they lose a movie? How is that possible?"

Then I learned that a lot of these films were independently made and they had a distribution deal with the studio. But the studio didn't own the movie. And the studio may not have even produced the movie. So now all these film preservationists and restorationists call these movies "orphans," because they don't have a parent.

It's like Dick Powell made "Cry Danger" and it was released by RKO. But it's not an RKO film. It was financed by two guys from Omaha that Dick Powell talked out of their money, so he could make an independent film. And then when that distribution deal lapsed, nobody was quite sure who owned the movie. And those are the films that I tend to go after, where they've slipped through the cracks for various business reasons really.

And then to your point, Paul, what became really interesting was I started realizing that I had better luck finding missing movies in film archives overseas than I had finding them in the States, because overseas they weren't as quick to to junk stuff as they were in this country, where it's like, "Well, we don't own that, so why do we have it here? Throw it away." That's the attitude in a lot of American studios and archives, right?

In some ways, it's just by luck that some of these movies that I've restored, that we've recovered them. Have you ever seen "Woman on the Run" with Ann Sheridan?

PCC:
I love that movie... and I love Ann Sheridan.

MULLER:
Well, that's a movie that had disappeared. It was a Fidelity Pictures film, long out of business, but the original distribution deal was with Universal. When I was doing some research on the movie, I stumbled across the original distribution deal with Universal and it said, "Upon dissolution of this agreement, one archival print will remain with Universal Pictures." And so I made a photocopy of that and I showed it to the guy who was in charge of distribution at Universal and I said, "According to this, you should still have this print. It should be here somewhere." But they had shunted it off to a part of the archive where it was stuff they didn't own and they couldn't technically make money with it, because the agreement was over. But I'll be damned if the print wasn't there.

So we just had to sign a letter of indemnity that said if the people who own the movie today resurface and demand money, they're going to demand it from me and not from Universal. I said, "I'll take that bet." And then we were eventually able to restore that film, which Universal didn't own.

The British Film Institute has been a huge benefit to me, because London is where American studios would send their movies to be distributed in Europe. They'd send them to London and then prints would be made and then, depending on where they were going, they would ship them the stuff that would be like dupe negatives and stuff, so that subtitles could be put on in the various markets. So like a movie going to France or Berlin would go through London.

And so a lot of those films would remain at the British Film Archive, but the BFI, their charter is to restore and preserve only British films. So if I find a movie there that is an American film, they'll just send me whatever material they have on it, just as like an archive to archive kind of thing. And then we can restore it. So that's what happened with "Woman on the Run." They actually had a dupe negative in the archive that we were able to use as the basis for restoring that movie... That's a way longer answer than you were expecting.

PCC:
[Laughs] No, it's fascinating. It must be so gratifying, the work you do with your Foundation.

MULLER:
It really is. It's great. And like I say, so that's how I found a lot of things in archives overseas. But then people that I met there, like my friend Fernando Peña in Argentina, he would introduce me to Argentine film noir, which was astounding to me. So we're finding stuff all over the place. In America, it's hard to get people to cough up money to restore films in another language. That's tougher. But I'm forging ahead with that, because I think it's so important that people see that the film noir era was not exclusive to Hollywood. It's very important that people recognize that.

PCC:
Yes, you've presented some riveting films from overseas that I'd never seen... Is there a holy grail, in terms of a lost film you'd love to uncover or restore?

MULLER:
There are a few things that I'd really love to restore. But I just say, "Yeah, it's a movie that I don't know about yet." I mean, just like I didn't know about these Argentine films. When Fernando introduced me to these films like "El Vampiro Negro," "The Beast Must Die" and this stuff, they were total revelations to me. Nobody outside of Argentina even knew that these movies existed.

I have great cinephile colleagues in France and when I would email and say, "What do you think of this movie?" like "La Bestia Debe Morir," "The Beast Must Die." And they say, "What is that? That's the Claude Chabrol movie, right?" And I'd say, "No, no, no. It was made in 1952 in Argentina, 17 years before Chabrol made his version of it in France." And literally no one had heard of the movie. And so that is incredibly gratifying, to give a film not only a new lease on life, but honestly, like a first lease on life, because these movies hadn't been seen in 60 years.

PCC:
From your perspective, are there certain elements that have to be there, in order for a film to be classified as noir?

MULLER:
That's interesting. That is kind of an eye of the beholder thing. I mean, obviously, in many cases, it's going to be a crime story. There's going to be a criminal element to it. And there's going to be something about the visual look of the movie that feels like film noir. I might be persuaded to color outside of the lines, if it was a really good film that featured either a performer or a writer or a director who is very well known to people who love noir.

There's a couple of unusual films that were made in Mexico in the 1950s where like Jack Palance would go to Mexico to make a movie and it doesn't really feel like a full-blown noir, but the writer and the director and a couple of the actors... It's like, "We may want to check this out and look into restoring this film." That happens a lot.

PCC:
Why was the time so right, between the end of World War II and the mid-50s, for filmmakers to explore noir themes?

MULLER:
I think there was a very practical reason for it. The thing I always say about film noir, what makes it so interesting, it's an organic artistic movement. There was no business reason for it to happen. Like the heads of the studios didn't say, "We're going to be making these now." It was the artists themselves -- the writers, the directors and the actors -- who really made it happen. And of course the cinematographers.

And I think it happened because artists were -- I don't want to say fed up -- but they had spent so much time writing a certain kind of uplifting story, because their job was to get America through the Depression and then get America through World War II. And in some ways, it's very ironic that the artistic reward for having done hat job and done it well was that now, in 1946, they could start telling uglier stories that didn't have to end well. There was no edict anymore that it has to end well. And I think it was just artists, being contrarians by nature, at least the ones who wrote this kind of stuff, were saying, "Yeah, I've always wanted to do a story where the protagonists are the bad guys."

That's really why "Double Indemnity" was such an influential and subversive movie, is because it took a couple of really popular movie stars and made them the villains. And that was not a common thing in Hollywood at the time. And to me, that's always been one of my essential aspects of noir, is that it's asking the audience to empathize with people who are doing the wrong thing. You know they're going to get their comeuppance and all that, but at least you get to spend 90 minutes watching that happen.

To me, that's kind of what sets noir apart. It's a crime story and the truly noir ones are told from the criminal's point of view. That's like "The Killers." Or you get a movie like "Touch of Evil," where the villain is the cop. That's a very different approach to the story. I think that's really what it was for me.

And, of course, in post-war Hollywood, because of what was happening with the beginnings of the anti-communist witch hunt and everything, there was a sense of paranoia that was taking over the business that I think also had a certain amount of influence on what people were writing, like stories where you can't trust anybody and you don't know who's your friend and everybody's out to get you. I think that was the pervasive mood in Hollywood in the late 40s and early 50s. So it found its way into crime stories, because you couldn't really make a flat-out political statement at that time. But if you wove it into a crime story, you could get away with it.

PCC:
Yeah, even if it was in the subtext, there was a lot of reaction against McCarthyism with so many noir actors, directors and writers being victimized by HUAC.

MULLER:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

PCC:
Do you think that maybe because, these days, we still have more than our share of alienation, suspicion, conspiracies, corruption... do you think that's why modern audiences can relate so well to these vintage noir films?

MULLER:
Well, it's interesting to say that, Paul, because a great percentage of my audience for these films, I think they watch the old movies for comfort. Even though they feel like, "Oh, this is great, because it's tough, there's all the wisecracks, the movies are sexy and everything," but yeah, you're seeing the beginning of America's loss of innocence. But it still feels comforting to people to think, "Yeah, but it hasn't gotten as bad as it is today."

Interestingly, invariably, when I talk about the political climate at the time these films were made, I do get backlash from people who say, "Stop talking about the politics. They're just movies. We don't want to hear about the politics," which I think is just complete bullshit. Because you need to know this is what was happening. If you wonder why Abraham Polonsky made only two movies and then never made another movie for 18 years, here's the reason why [the Oscar-nominated writer/director was blacklisted].

It's weird. I don't know what to tell you about the culture at large, like why superhero movies run the business now. Like what does that say about America, that the comic books that I read as a child 50 years ago are now the bedrock of the entertainment industry? That's confounding to me and I don't know what that says about the culture. It doesn't say anything too good, as far as I'm concerned. But that's just the way it goes.

PCC:
With all the booze and broads and violence in some of these movies, have you ever had any pushback from the political correctness police over content?

MULLER:
It happens. Absolutely. Yes.

PCC:
On the more positive side of the ledger, there appears to be a genuine camaraderie among the TCM presenters. And the network projects a sense of family that extends to the viewership. It seems like a community feeling has been established. Is that something you've felt and embraced?

MULLER:
Absolutely. That is very true. Even though we know there are cranks [chuckles] among the viewership, honestly, when you look at the entertainment business in this country as a whole, I would say that TCM probably has the most loyal and committed viewership of anybody. It's just not the biggest viewership. So that's why I feel at times like all this stuff is, I don't want to say under attack or threatened, but just the way the business is moving forward, you can't help that feel that every five years that classic cinema becomes more marginalized, in a sense. But I can definitely attest to the fact that TCM fans are the most loyal viewers in the world. If I had a nickel for every time that somebody told me, "TCM is on 24/7 in my house. I never turn it off. It's just on all the time." I don't think you can say that of too many other networks.

PCC:
What's been the most satisfying part of hosting "Noir Alley"? What's been the most challenging?

MULLER:
Nothing has been too challenging. It's been great. The most satisfying part is the feedback, just from individual people who really love it. During Covid, it was really, really wonderful to hear from people who said, "Every week I get together with..." fill in the blank, my father, my mother, my son, whatever "and we make a date to watch a movie." And that was a real bonding thing for people during Covid, because it was something really simple that they could do. And I found that it was a real cross-generational thing. Like, "I finally got my son to watch these old movies with me and he really loves your show." That is by far the most gratifying thing.

PCC:
Interviewing guest programmer Ann-Margret on TCM, you said you were starstruck and that was a rarity for you. There must have been noir stars you met, maybe at your festivals, who impressed you. You have a great piece on Lawrence Tierney on your website. Who else of the noir luminaries made a lasting impression?

MULLER:
Well, all of the actresses that I interviewed for my book, Dark City Dames -- Marie Windsor and Audrey Totter and Jane Greer, several more, Evelyn Keyes and Ann Savage, Colleen Gray. Those were the six. They were all terrific. I think my favorite interview I ever did was Ricardo Montalban, just because I had so much respect for him and I just thought he was an amazing guy. And we had great fun doing that interview. Other than that, no one really stands out completely. I mean, Tierney, obviously, was memorable [laughs]. Farley Granger was great. He was a lot of fun. And sometimes I forget, because I become good friends with some of these people. Like Diane Baker is now a really, really good friend of mine. We talk like once a week or something. It's interesting, because she was very close to Robert Osborne. And so I'm not saying I've taken Robert's place, but it's interesting to me that I'm now like a confidant to Diane. She's just wonderful. She's got her hands in a lot of stuff. She's a vital woman who is interested in young people, as well, and working with them in like performing arts schools. She's great.

PCC:
You're known as the Czar of Noir. Why do you think you have been so drawn to depictions of the dark side of life?

MULLER:
I don't know. It's just the way that we're wired. Partly it was because, my dad worked with the San Francisco Examiner. He was a sports writer. And his background, he was not a noir figure, but he worked in a very noir world -- newspapers and boxing gyms. He hung out with a lot of shady characters. And so I kind of grew up with that. And then when I'd watch the movies, it was like, "Well, this is the way it was in my dad's time." So it was always very interesting to me. And something about it just resonated. Some people love westerns. Some people love musicals I like the crime dramas

PCC:
But do you have a guilty pleasure film that's at the far end of the spectrum from noir? A musical comedy, a Shirley Temple movie, a sentimental Capra picture?

MULLER:
Well, the one that surprises people is when they learn that I'm a huge Doris Day fan. That surprises people. And I tell you, I'm such a huge Doris Day fan that I have now been put on the board of the Doris Day Animal Foundation, because they heard me talking about how much I Ioved Doris Day and then at the TCM Festival a couple of years ago, they did a hundredth birthday celebration for Doris and a lot of her best friends came out and I interviewed them and we had a great talk. We all hit it off.

And then the guy who was in charge, the executive director of the foundation, met me and we just started talking and I said, "Oh, I'm a cat guy." And this is so funny, because, usually, when you start talking about your pets, people's eyes glaze over and they're like, "Oh, shit, he's going to show me pictures now. Oh, my God." But I did that with this guy and he was like, "Wow, you really love animals. You should be on the board." And I said, "I'd be honored." And the next thing you know, I am on the board. That's pretty cool.

PCC:
And speaking of cats, proving that noir truly is for everyone, I see that, in the fall, you have a Kid Noir book coming out -- Kitty Feral and the Case of the Marshmallow Monkey.

MULLER:
[Laughs] That's right. It's done. I actually have a copy right here. It turned out great. And, of course, the reasoning behind that, I just felt it would be fun. I like kids books. I don't even have kids and I buy children's books, just because I like the style. I like the storytelling. They're appealing, because they're innocent.

So I was approached with the idea of doing this and I said, "As long as it's in black and white, then I'll do that, because it is part of my mission to convince younger people to watch these films. It felt like if we did a book like this in black and white, then when kids see the movie, they'll get it. It'll resonate with them. Like, "Oh, this is like the book that I liked when I was a kid."

I'm sure that you have favorite children's books that you remember fondly. Scuppers The Sailor Dog was the favorite of mine, when I was a kid. That was a dog who's a sailor who shipwrecks on an island and builds himself a lean-to to survive and all this stuff. I loved that book. And so I felt like, if I could write one of those that somehow connected to the movies, that'd be pretty cool.

PCC:
Then maybe you can put together a Kid Noir Bar book with mocktails.

MULLER:
Well, that would be perfect. Actually, I think my goal is to have a book where you can buy it for your kids to teach them how to make you cocktails.

PCC:
Well, we'll look forward to checking that out, along with all of your future projects. Meanwhile, we'll be mixing a batch of cocktails for our next visit to "Noir Alley."

For more information on Eddie Muller's many projects, visit http://eddiemuller.com/