For those that may have an interest in these sets for the future, here's some more information:
http://www.geocities.com/thalaric1/sites/leone/
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_rev ... 40794.html
http://www.sergioleone.net/archeo/book.html
http://garringo.cool.ne.jp/
http://www.btinternet.com/%7Eramon/sw/
http://www.tucotours.co.uk/
Amusing background on Straight To Hell (from
http://industrycentral.net/director_interviews/AC01.HTM):
HOW DID STRAIGHT TO HELL HAPPEN?
While we were editing SID & NANCY I organised a concert at the Fridge in Brixton, in support of the FSLN (Sandanista National Liberation Front) in Nicaragua. The Pogues, and Elvis Costello, and Joe Strummer all played to a full house and we made a couple of thousand quid for the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign.
Eric Fellner, the producer of SID & NANCY, came up with a grander scheme: since the public clearly loved the musicians and was sympathetic to the Nicaraguan cause, why not organize a rock'n'roll tour of Nicaragua, involving the same guys? Eric figured that a video deal would pay for it, and we persuaded the said musicians to sign up for a month-long accoustic Nicaragua Solidarity Tour in August 1996. The bands agreed; but we couldn't find a video company that would fund the tour.
Which put us in an embarrassing position, having persuaded at least a dozen musicians not to tour or record for the entire month of August. Eric's solution? Make a film instead: as he predicted, it was easier to raise $1m for a low-budget feature starring various musicians than to find $75,000 to film them playing in a revolutionary nation in the middle of a war.
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF STRAIGHT TO HELL?
I think it's very funny. I like that it has no swearing at all (the worst thing anybody says is "Go boil yer 'ead!"). I'm impressed by some of the performances - particularly Sy Richardson, Fox Harris, Biff Yeager, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, and Courtney Love. The characters were written for the actors, and I thought Courtney's part was great: like Nancy Spungen if Nancy had been a tougher and more together individual. She'd played a small part in SID & NANCY: this was the second time we worked together, and her first leading role. And it was Sy Richardson's first lead role in a feature: he is a great, great actor - I'm honoured to have worked with him so many times.
A LOT OF CRITICS DIDN'T LIKE STRAIGHT TO HELL.
A lot of critics didn't like Jacobean tragedy, or Spaghetti Westerns, either, until many years passed and they became respectable. There are also people who don't like the desert - they think it looks like a dust-filled slag-heap. That is their point of view. For me the greatest pleasure of STRAIGHT TO HELL was filming in that fantastic, surreal Andalucia landscape -- the desert of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY, and FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE - films with extraordinary locations: the weird, ancient clay and sandstone and volcanic badlands, the huge triangular mountain of El Faro on the horizon.
There is a certain beauty to being on location, to working in Spain, in Mexico, staying in white-walled towns, walking the streets at night, rising at dawn and working out in the desert till the last light of the sun is gone, which cannot be simply explained.
“I know all those people that were in the film [...] But that’s when they were young and strong and full of life, you know?”
