Legendary writer/director Sam Fuller helped me with story-line of my novel "COLD– THE 1918-19 SIBERIAN ESCAPE OF CAPTAIN EWALD LOEFFLER," (based on my father's real-life 2-year walk home, WWI).
https://www.amazon.com/1918-19-Siberian-Escape-Captain-Loeffler-ebook/dp/B076VBJB62/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_pl_foot_top?ie=UTF8
In 1992, I recounted my father’s Siberian story with the legendary writer/director Samuel Fuller (The Steel Helmet, The Big Red One, etc.,), when he and I were among the few Americans attending Figueira da Foz International Film Festival in Portugal. With a friendly wave, and a salutary, “Rick!” he had urged me over to his oceanside park bench a few hours after watching my American Orpheus, which had been selected for the Main Feature Competition at the festival by the Director Jose Vieira Maqrquez (he’d seen it at Rotterdam INTL. when it screened mid-January that year).
Happy to be meeting the great writer/director Samuel Fuller in a Portuguese doorway at FIGUEIRA DA FOZ INTL. FILM FESTIVAL, who’s film STEEL HELMET (1951) I had watched on TV as a kid in Chicago (heavy stuff that was somehow available on one of the networks then, back in the 1950s!)
HIS ADVICE FOR MY STORY
After I told Mr. Fuller the basic outline of my proposed narritive he proceeded to give me his Hollywood-hardened, combat-tested, WWII war-reporter’s advice on how best to script a movie based on my father’s incarceration at a Siberian prison camp and his 2-year walk home to Germany, 1918-19. (Didn’t get to make the movie, but I did write a book).
“Start it the day your father left the prison camp]” he said. “And no battle scenes. Don't need ’em.” He glanced over, to see how his words had played.
“End with his mother’s words, and that’s it. You're done.”
It took ten years before I had the proper audacity to go for it, attempt to “live my father’s difficult, 2-year WWI saga” as a book project, spending spontaneous, several-month-long writing jags resulting in COLD, a novel now available on paperback and on Kindle.
(Needless to say, I took Mr. Fuller’s advice).
(READ COLD FOR FREE here, on KINDLE until midnight, TUES. night, 9/24/24––it’s part of an Amazon promotion).
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SAM FULLER’S BIO
A towering figure in the history of independent film, director Samuel Fuller unleashed his deeply personal, highly stylized vision of society teetering between greatness and disaster in such polarizing films as "The Steel Helmet" (1951), "Pickup on South Street" (1953), "Shock Corridor" (1963), "The Naked Kiss" (1964) and "The Big Red One" (1980). A former crime reporter who later endured some of the most brutal combat during World War II, Fuller served as a screenwriter before emerging as a director in 1950. His films challenged accepted notions of liberty, honor and patriotism through furiously paced, visually assaultive genre pictures informed by his experiences in the newsroom and on the battlefield.
Fuller's heroes were flawed but clung to a code of ethics that clashed with political and social organizations, a status that Fuller himself embodied in his frequent battles with producers to deliver his films as he saw them to the screen. He fell out of fashion after "Shock Corridor" and "The Naked Kiss," a pair of savage indictments of the hypocrisy he felt was at the core of American society, and spent the next three decades fighting to complete films while funding his efforts through acting roles.
In the years preceding his death in 1997, Fuller was transformed from industry pariah to patron saint of the independent film movement. A host of likeminded directors, including Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, would acknowledge the debt he paid throughout his career to allow their unique perspectives to take root on screen.
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COLD Synopsis Offered on Amazon.
COLD, THE 1918-19 SIBERIAN ESCAPE OF CAPTAIN EWALD LOEFFLER, a novel by Rick Schmidt, follows a young German soldier, Ewald Loeffler, as he struggles to traverse 5000km of frozen and barren land across Siberia, to finally reach Germany and his family home. After he'd been in a Siberian prison camp for four years, the guards suddenly deserted their posts to join the Russian Revolution in Moscow, leaving the prisoners to fend for themselves. Loeffler, in the minority of those who survived such extreme cold and other human dangers, tells a harrowing tale of just keeping alive, one day at a time. Later, after many years in America – Loeffler taught anthropology at a midwestern university – he manages to write his Siberian memoir of those early days. In the form of a daily log he recounts his fight against sub-zero weather, wolves and unknown enemies, both Russian and German.
He also recalls his most intimate thoughts at the time, including interactions with a native woman, Nanra-naw, who saved him, loved him, and aided him physically, emotionally, psychically and spiritually before he restarts his journey home. Memories of violent combat continue to haunt Loeffler, both from past battlefields and from the ongoing, seemingly-unending trek across Siberia. He is also deeply affected by psychological wounds he received in youth, abuse from a distant, uncaring father, and his reticent mother, though specks of rare 'happier times' do occasionally surface. His day-to-day survival in the cold is mostly a mind game, dependent on him keeping his spirits up against all the ghosts of war and remembrance. Schmidt's novel ('Loeffler's memoir'), is loosely based on the 1918 real-life Siberian escape of his own father,
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Reviews:
Chilling is the word for this German prisoners epic trek ...
Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2018
Chilling is the word for this German prisoners epic trek out of a frozen WWI Siberian prison camp abandoned by guards off to join the Russian revolution. It is a tale of survival that will make your fingers feel numb as you turn the pages. And turn them you will, as you walk with a cold and hungry man endlessly attacked by packs of wolves who are also hungry, 3000 miles across Russia to his home in Germany. This is a classic search for one's father, and it is based on the true story of the author's own father.
If you enjoy historical fiction blended with a mystical twist like I ...
Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2017
If you enjoy historical fiction blended with a mystical twist like I do, you will enjoy COLD. Set against the frigid Siberian winter, a WWI German prisoner suddenly finds his gulag deserted by his Russian captors and sets out to trek his way home to Germany. His journey is one of survival of the human spirit and serendipitous meetings along the way. I was drawn in by the storyline and couldn't put it down.
Amazing adventure
Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2020
"Cold" is simply an incredible journey into the mind of someone making an impossible journey of his own. It combines the best elements of survival, psychological thriller, and a historical treatise that you can't put down. The fact that anything like this actually happened is both incredible and sad beyond belief. Rick Schmidt deftly combines how a person's past, present, and future can occur simultaneously and what it truly means to live in the moment.
Now available on Amazon/Germany as well as at AMAZON/US (Paperback, hardcover, kindle)
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Amazon RATING/BEST SELLERS/”War Fiction,” for COLD.
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Photo I took of Sam Fuller during our Figueira da Foz Film Festival-sponsored outing to a nearby castle ruins (Portugal, 1992).
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I love these stories of encounters with artists we've held in esteem and, serendipitously, we actually get to meet! And "talk shop" with. (I know you have many similar stories.) Equivalent for me (alongside meeting YOU many years ago) would be wandering into a coffee shop and having Tom Robbins spot me and invite me to join him at his table because he wanted to give me advice about something of mine he'd read on Facebook.