Myth maker: Faces of Death director John A. Schwartz
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I wanted to take the opportunity to thank Nicolo Gallio for his thoughtful and analytical consideration of my film and the wider subject of the mondo movie phenomenon. As Nicolo notes in the course of his discussion, Faces of Death was, and a remains a controversial movie, and I think the film certainly fulfils the new journal’s theme of ‘Subverting the Senses.’ Although the Faces of Death series continues to generate discussion about its challenging images and the ethics under which we created it, I agree totally with Nicolo’s observation that its real power remains the ability to force the viewer to address uncomfortable issues of mortality. These issues were as much a part of the film’s creation, as the subsequent hysteria that the movie created.
Another point is this. Part of the controversy about the film was that people couldn’t distinguish its fact from its fiction. Perhaps its message is even more relevant now we live in a world that is manipulated by the media. 35 years ago when I created Faces of Death under the pseudonum of Conan Le Cilaire, I had no idea it would be voted the 27th most controversial film of all time. Of course, what I really did was fool people around the world. At its peak the movie was banned in 48 countries. |
To date the film has grossed over 60 million dollars. What made Faces of Death so controversial was that people couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction in the film. We took real life footage and combined it with recreated footage so that we were fabricating reality before it became a ‘found footage’ trend decades later. Faces of Death never seems to lose its popularity generation after generation. I’m still asked to do interviews, nationally and internationally—at least in countries that have lifted the ban! It takes a communal effort to make a film, and that was the case with Faces of Death. With our small, experienced crew and special effects team, we broke boundary after boundary, until, as things got truly bizarre, we grew convinced there was a strange force surrounding us. A lot of frightening things happened but that never stopped us. Given artistic freedom we kept plunging forward, seeing how extreme and outrageous we could be and how far we were willing to go into the darkest recesses of death.
There were actually four Faces of Death, plus a fact or fiction supplement. I like the first Faces of Death the most. There is an innocence and insanity that gives the original movie a unique tone. Our original budget for Faces of Death was $450,000.00 and we came in under budget! Oftentimes, people ask: how do you create a cult classic? The answer is simple: you can’t! You need luck and the nerve of not being afraid to go all the way. And I do mean all the way. When you do that maybe you’ll click with something everyone shares but hasn’t been able to face. In the end that’s what Faces of Death was all about—shining light on the one thing we all have to face.
These days reality television rules the medium. Everyone is looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. Most of the shows have become homogenized and repetitious. People often ask me what the next level of reality television might be? Perhaps it will be a show that tracks the demise and destruction of humanity. After all, why couldn’t a terrorist group armed with a dirty bomb shoot their own reality show before they blow up the world? I’m sure it would get high ratings, assuming there was an audience alive to watch!
Facts of Death: My Background
In order to give some more detail to Nicolo’s contextualisation of the movie, it might be worth my mentioning how I actually got involved in the movie to begin with. After graduating from Cal Arts with a bachelor of fine arts in theatre, I decided I was going to become the next hot director in Hollywood, as I had directed a few plays in college that received critical acclaim. Boy, was I delusional! The truth was I knew nothing about film. So I did the next logical thing and got hired as a runner/production assistant for various movie and television production companies. At the same time I started hanging out in the editing bay and learned the art of film editing. I soon worked my way up from an assistant editor to a full editor. Although my skill was marginal I heard about a small family production house looking for an editor. Thanks to a friend I got the job. It was here that I wrote my first documentary called Creatures of the Amazon, a two hour syndicated documentary profiling the natives and the animals that populate the unique places on our planet. Since I had never been to the Amazon, editors cutting this special would send me finished segments without sound. I would study the footage, go to the library and hunt for facts and tales about the Amazon, and apply them. I soon had wall to wall narration.
During the recording session the boss started screaming that the movie was over-written. I had one chance: to take my pen and make cuts or face being fired. I re-edited my narration while everyone was out to lunch. When my boss started the afternoon recording session he was pleased. The gods were with me, as the newly edited version worked well. The truth was that I had no idea what I was doing but I pulled it off while getting a crash course in narrative film writing. I learned that when you put words to a picture the words had to add colour. I learned not to write what I was seeing but find scenic bridges between the words and images. I was in my early twenties feeling, immortal, insane and ready to die for my craft. Sometimes, you have to be careful what you wish for.
Over the next couple of years the owner’s son and I became friends and collaborators on several projects. One day several Japanese executives came to us and asked if we could make a documentary about death. They wanted us to capture the horror of extinction, and the more macabre the better. After the meeting the owner’s son came up with the title and I came up with the concept: the story of a pathologist who over time has compiled a library of death. The movie would simply chronicle his experiences.
I was inspired by The Hellstorm Chronicles, a movie about an etymologist who believes that insects will destroy mankind and take over the earth. The film was shot as a documentary and was so believable that I was convinced it was true. As the end credits rolled I discovered the documentary was fabrication and had twisted the truth by combining fact with fiction. I had the insight that this is what I wanted to do with our movie.
Staging a Sadistic Fiction
The first thing we had to do was to write up a treatment. We mixed real ideas with stories fuelled by our own imagination. We had no idea how we would produce our segments but we agreed that the more shocking and bloody the better. In order to link these extreme sequences together, we had to find was someone who could play our pathologist. We met with many actors but none had the unique quality we were seeking. What that quality was weren’t sure of. But we’d know it when we saw it. One day I spotted that quality and it was the face of death itself.
I remember walking down the hallway when I observed a tall, skinny, guy dressed in black, smoking a slim cigarette, and slouching toward me. He was in his early forties. Behind his glasses there was doom in his eyes. I immediately knew he was our pathologist, who I decided to name Dr Gross. I went to my partner and told him I had found our on-camera host. My partner took one look at the guy, shuddered, and agreed. A day later we met with the fellow whose name was Michael Carr. He was not overly interested in participating. I handed Mike some copy and asked him to read it. Carr asked us to leave the room so he could study the copy. About ten minutes later he opened the door and asked, “Who wrote this shit?” I raised my hand and Carr laughed. Carr read us the copy. His reading glasses were cockeyed. He would grunt and groan in a deathly monotone as he said the words. It was like watching a hangman prepare the noose or the Angel of Death sharpen his scythe. I intuitively knew this was a role of a lifetime for Mike and on some perverse level he knew it too.
Over the next few days I wrote up a back story for Mike’s character. We created a whole bio about this crazy pathologist. What I needed was the reason why he was so fascinated with death. What would compel a pathologist to maintain his own library of death? The answer was not easy until I came up with the idea that our doctor had recurring nightmares about death complete with perpetual funerals. To create the dream sequence, we filmed a bunch of us dressed in suits carrying an open coffin, The girl in the coffin, an office secretary, was dressed in white. She looked angelic and scary at the same time .When we filmed the closing of the coffin we kept the girl her inside too long. When we lifted her out she was unconscious. It was touch and go but we revived her. She was almost our first face of death! Maybe we should have heeded the warning. We debated if maybe the project was too risky. We decided to go forth. It was now time to film the segments I had concocted as part of Dr. Gross’s library of death
The Slaughter Houses
Nicolo’s article repeatedly returns the the theme of Faces of Death forcing the viewer to consider differing aspects of mortality and cruelty. One area of death we had to explore was life in the slaughterhouse. We first filmed at a slaughter house in Vernon, California. The place was a massive killing machine. Thousands of cattle were killed every day. There is a certain smell of death in such a place that permeates your clothes and your body. Weeks later after filming in this place some of my clothes still smelled like death. The killing process is swift. A stun gun is placed in the back of the cow’s head. This swift blow knocks the cattle out and it slides down to the butchers waiting to cut it up. In the kosher slaughtering process a Rabbi says a prayer as he slits the cow’s throat and watches the animal bleed to death.
The workers are always sharpening their knives. I asked many of them what it was like to do this day after day. One said, “Someone has got to do it so it might as well be me.” As the dead animal moves down the conveyor belt every part of its body is butchered. Another place we filmed was a lamb slaughterhouse in a town in Northern California called Petaluma. There was one experience that I’ll never forget. One of the guys came up to me and said. “Put me in your movie.” I replied “Why should I?” Without saying a word he bit the ear off a living lamb and spat it out. The lamb’s screams reverberate in my head to this day. I never did put him in the film…
The way they slaughter a lamb is to stick it in the back of the head with a stun pole and apply an electric charge that paralyzes the animal. The lamb is then connected to a conveyor belt and butchered within minutes. One of the guys led me to a pen filled with about 20 lambs. He handed me the stun pole and said, “Come on Gringo they’re all yours.” In the next moment I went into a frenzy and stunned the lambs. As they were placed on the line my hands were shaking. At that moment I swore I would never eat meat again. Three hours later we went to lunch and had lamb kabobs. How quickly we forget. I think none of us wanted to appear fearful. How stupid was that?
We also shot in a chicken slaughterhouse. This place was a massive killing machine. The chickens are placed on a conveyor belt upside down to disorient them. Their throats are then slit by workers on the line. The next stop is the de-feathering process where feathers are plucked in seconds. Then the birds are cut up and stored in a giant freezer. Walking through the freezer filled with thousands of freshly killed chickens had its own smell of death. I wonder if Colonel Sanders ever saw the inside of one of them.
One intimate slaughter took place at a crew member’s aunt’s house. She was slaughtering a rooster for dinner and let us film her home grown process. She sharpened her axe then placed the rooster on a butcher block. Several seconds later she chopped off the bird’s head. The rooster danced around the barnyard for what seemed like minutes When the bird finally died, the woman drained the blood and asked if we would like to stay for dinner. We took a rain check.
When filming in slaughter houses one could sense the fear of the animals. Perhaps animals too had the fear of the unknown. I will never forget seeing what it takes to feed the hungry masses and how we hide the horror and the process behind our food.
There were actually four Faces of Death, plus a fact or fiction supplement. I like the first Faces of Death the most. There is an innocence and insanity that gives the original movie a unique tone. Our original budget for Faces of Death was $450,000.00 and we came in under budget! Oftentimes, people ask: how do you create a cult classic? The answer is simple: you can’t! You need luck and the nerve of not being afraid to go all the way. And I do mean all the way. When you do that maybe you’ll click with something everyone shares but hasn’t been able to face. In the end that’s what Faces of Death was all about—shining light on the one thing we all have to face.
These days reality television rules the medium. Everyone is looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. Most of the shows have become homogenized and repetitious. People often ask me what the next level of reality television might be? Perhaps it will be a show that tracks the demise and destruction of humanity. After all, why couldn’t a terrorist group armed with a dirty bomb shoot their own reality show before they blow up the world? I’m sure it would get high ratings, assuming there was an audience alive to watch!
Facts of Death: My Background
In order to give some more detail to Nicolo’s contextualisation of the movie, it might be worth my mentioning how I actually got involved in the movie to begin with. After graduating from Cal Arts with a bachelor of fine arts in theatre, I decided I was going to become the next hot director in Hollywood, as I had directed a few plays in college that received critical acclaim. Boy, was I delusional! The truth was I knew nothing about film. So I did the next logical thing and got hired as a runner/production assistant for various movie and television production companies. At the same time I started hanging out in the editing bay and learned the art of film editing. I soon worked my way up from an assistant editor to a full editor. Although my skill was marginal I heard about a small family production house looking for an editor. Thanks to a friend I got the job. It was here that I wrote my first documentary called Creatures of the Amazon, a two hour syndicated documentary profiling the natives and the animals that populate the unique places on our planet. Since I had never been to the Amazon, editors cutting this special would send me finished segments without sound. I would study the footage, go to the library and hunt for facts and tales about the Amazon, and apply them. I soon had wall to wall narration.
During the recording session the boss started screaming that the movie was over-written. I had one chance: to take my pen and make cuts or face being fired. I re-edited my narration while everyone was out to lunch. When my boss started the afternoon recording session he was pleased. The gods were with me, as the newly edited version worked well. The truth was that I had no idea what I was doing but I pulled it off while getting a crash course in narrative film writing. I learned that when you put words to a picture the words had to add colour. I learned not to write what I was seeing but find scenic bridges between the words and images. I was in my early twenties feeling, immortal, insane and ready to die for my craft. Sometimes, you have to be careful what you wish for.
Over the next couple of years the owner’s son and I became friends and collaborators on several projects. One day several Japanese executives came to us and asked if we could make a documentary about death. They wanted us to capture the horror of extinction, and the more macabre the better. After the meeting the owner’s son came up with the title and I came up with the concept: the story of a pathologist who over time has compiled a library of death. The movie would simply chronicle his experiences.
I was inspired by The Hellstorm Chronicles, a movie about an etymologist who believes that insects will destroy mankind and take over the earth. The film was shot as a documentary and was so believable that I was convinced it was true. As the end credits rolled I discovered the documentary was fabrication and had twisted the truth by combining fact with fiction. I had the insight that this is what I wanted to do with our movie.
Staging a Sadistic Fiction
The first thing we had to do was to write up a treatment. We mixed real ideas with stories fuelled by our own imagination. We had no idea how we would produce our segments but we agreed that the more shocking and bloody the better. In order to link these extreme sequences together, we had to find was someone who could play our pathologist. We met with many actors but none had the unique quality we were seeking. What that quality was weren’t sure of. But we’d know it when we saw it. One day I spotted that quality and it was the face of death itself.
I remember walking down the hallway when I observed a tall, skinny, guy dressed in black, smoking a slim cigarette, and slouching toward me. He was in his early forties. Behind his glasses there was doom in his eyes. I immediately knew he was our pathologist, who I decided to name Dr Gross. I went to my partner and told him I had found our on-camera host. My partner took one look at the guy, shuddered, and agreed. A day later we met with the fellow whose name was Michael Carr. He was not overly interested in participating. I handed Mike some copy and asked him to read it. Carr asked us to leave the room so he could study the copy. About ten minutes later he opened the door and asked, “Who wrote this shit?” I raised my hand and Carr laughed. Carr read us the copy. His reading glasses were cockeyed. He would grunt and groan in a deathly monotone as he said the words. It was like watching a hangman prepare the noose or the Angel of Death sharpen his scythe. I intuitively knew this was a role of a lifetime for Mike and on some perverse level he knew it too.
Over the next few days I wrote up a back story for Mike’s character. We created a whole bio about this crazy pathologist. What I needed was the reason why he was so fascinated with death. What would compel a pathologist to maintain his own library of death? The answer was not easy until I came up with the idea that our doctor had recurring nightmares about death complete with perpetual funerals. To create the dream sequence, we filmed a bunch of us dressed in suits carrying an open coffin, The girl in the coffin, an office secretary, was dressed in white. She looked angelic and scary at the same time .When we filmed the closing of the coffin we kept the girl her inside too long. When we lifted her out she was unconscious. It was touch and go but we revived her. She was almost our first face of death! Maybe we should have heeded the warning. We debated if maybe the project was too risky. We decided to go forth. It was now time to film the segments I had concocted as part of Dr. Gross’s library of death
The Slaughter Houses
Nicolo’s article repeatedly returns the the theme of Faces of Death forcing the viewer to consider differing aspects of mortality and cruelty. One area of death we had to explore was life in the slaughterhouse. We first filmed at a slaughter house in Vernon, California. The place was a massive killing machine. Thousands of cattle were killed every day. There is a certain smell of death in such a place that permeates your clothes and your body. Weeks later after filming in this place some of my clothes still smelled like death. The killing process is swift. A stun gun is placed in the back of the cow’s head. This swift blow knocks the cattle out and it slides down to the butchers waiting to cut it up. In the kosher slaughtering process a Rabbi says a prayer as he slits the cow’s throat and watches the animal bleed to death.
The workers are always sharpening their knives. I asked many of them what it was like to do this day after day. One said, “Someone has got to do it so it might as well be me.” As the dead animal moves down the conveyor belt every part of its body is butchered. Another place we filmed was a lamb slaughterhouse in a town in Northern California called Petaluma. There was one experience that I’ll never forget. One of the guys came up to me and said. “Put me in your movie.” I replied “Why should I?” Without saying a word he bit the ear off a living lamb and spat it out. The lamb’s screams reverberate in my head to this day. I never did put him in the film…
The way they slaughter a lamb is to stick it in the back of the head with a stun pole and apply an electric charge that paralyzes the animal. The lamb is then connected to a conveyor belt and butchered within minutes. One of the guys led me to a pen filled with about 20 lambs. He handed me the stun pole and said, “Come on Gringo they’re all yours.” In the next moment I went into a frenzy and stunned the lambs. As they were placed on the line my hands were shaking. At that moment I swore I would never eat meat again. Three hours later we went to lunch and had lamb kabobs. How quickly we forget. I think none of us wanted to appear fearful. How stupid was that?
We also shot in a chicken slaughterhouse. This place was a massive killing machine. The chickens are placed on a conveyor belt upside down to disorient them. Their throats are then slit by workers on the line. The next stop is the de-feathering process where feathers are plucked in seconds. Then the birds are cut up and stored in a giant freezer. Walking through the freezer filled with thousands of freshly killed chickens had its own smell of death. I wonder if Colonel Sanders ever saw the inside of one of them.
One intimate slaughter took place at a crew member’s aunt’s house. She was slaughtering a rooster for dinner and let us film her home grown process. She sharpened her axe then placed the rooster on a butcher block. Several seconds later she chopped off the bird’s head. The rooster danced around the barnyard for what seemed like minutes When the bird finally died, the woman drained the blood and asked if we would like to stay for dinner. We took a rain check.
When filming in slaughter houses one could sense the fear of the animals. Perhaps animals too had the fear of the unknown. I will never forget seeing what it takes to feed the hungry masses and how we hide the horror and the process behind our food.
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Facts and Fictions
In terms of the issues of fact and fiction that Nicolo discusses, it might be worth considering the following. Some people have argued that the mondo movie made its staged scenes too apparent, but with Faces of Death it was now time to try to mix the real with the imagined and make it appear seamless. The seamless nature effect can be seen in some of the human execution scenes staged in the film. But the true challenge of the film’s concept and the segment that followed the harsh reality of animal slaughter was among our most daring. In fact, the segment is perhaps the most controversial story in the original Faces of Death. I had come up with the idea of a restaurant somewhere in the Middle East where diners kill a monkey at their table and eat its brains. I had read it was supposed to be a religious experience. After doing a bit more research I found that people do eat monkey brains but the monkeys are never brought live to the table. |
Facts and fictions: myths of the macabre in Faces of Death
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Our fictional restaurant did all that and more. We hired a monkey trainer with his most tractable monkey. Our makeup team sculpted a duplicate head that the waiter would open. We built a special table with a round opening so the animal’s head could be secured as the table’s center piece. We also constructed foam mallets that looked real. We found a Moroccan restaurant in Long Beach with a belly dancer.
The owner of the restaurant and his wife sat at the table with two older crew members. The four looked like tourists out for a special meal in a foreign country.
The table was set and we were ready to go. We had to film in one take due to the insistence of the animal trainer. We began with the belly dancer gyrating her hips. The tourists tipped her and one the men slapped her ass, as typical ugly Americans would.
Next up was the monkey and his trainer, both dressed in middle- east garb.
When the trainer placed the monkey’s head into the table opening the animal freaked. The trainer tried to calm the monkey down with little success. The diners were told to hit the monkey on the head as if to kill it. Although the foam mallets were harmless the monkey cried out as if he was being slaughtered. He was a damn good actor. We shot with three cameras and once we got the footage and reaction shots we replaced the monkey with a perfectly sculpted double. One of our makeup guys cracked open the phony skull and it looked like real brains. Our diners showed a range of emotions as they dipped spoons inside the head and nibbled on the” brains”, which were red- dyed cauliflower. If you looked closely you could see a nail holding down the bloody cauliflower. Fortunately, most people weren’t that observant. We had sound problems so we looped the scene and four of the crew supplied the voices. When we reviewed the footage we knew we were onto something. The monkey scene seemed as genuine as the Vernon slaughter house. To this day this is the one segment that people swear is real.
Dog Fights and Near Death
As long as we were descending into the profane, I had the idea to do a segment about dog fighting. We put out the word and after several negotiations and thousands in cash we went to Compton to film a fight. We went to a rundown neighbourhood where roof top lookouts with binoculars kept their eyes open for cops.
Two pit bulls were brought out and they lunged at one another. The hatred was real. We told our contact that we didn’t need a dog to die. Our plan was to squirt mock blood on the dogs to make things look much worse than they were. The dogs were placed in the ring and they went at it. I thought for sure one of them would be killed. The trainers were tough guys and these dogs were even tougher. We kept squirting phony blood over the dogs. One dog collapsed from exhaustion but staggered to his feet seconds later. We stopped the fight before he died. We had plenty of fight footage and it was a perfect place for us to stop filming. We could freeze-frame the dog that collapsed and give the illusion that the dog had died. Besides, some of the locals were getting too close to our equipment truck and it was time to get out of Compton.
We also travelled to Leon Mexico to film cock fights. Unfortunately I came down with “tourista” in the middle of filming. While the other guys filmed I wandered around the parking lot shitting and puking. I thought I would die and wondered if my passing would make an interesting segment. I had been feeling funky the whole day and I knew something was up. The night before we played poker and drank too many shots of tequila and ate pork burritos. I had ignored the rule that while in Mexico be careful what you eat and drink. I paid no attention and now I was paying for it big time. Later that evening our guide gave me some pills and I was back in 24 hours ready to eat and drink everything…well almost everything, until we began our next session of crazed filming.
Such experiences show how much the creation of Faces of Death involved a long hard look at the subject of both morality and mortality from a number of outlooks. As I suggest above, the filmmakers were themselves as much under threat of extinction as the subjects we covered in the movie. Although these recollections in the Cine-Excess journal will form part of a longer project I am currently writing about my experiences of creating the movie, I am glad to have the opportunity here to begin to distinguish some of the facts from the fictions behind Faces of Death.
John A. Schwartz
January 2013
The owner of the restaurant and his wife sat at the table with two older crew members. The four looked like tourists out for a special meal in a foreign country.
The table was set and we were ready to go. We had to film in one take due to the insistence of the animal trainer. We began with the belly dancer gyrating her hips. The tourists tipped her and one the men slapped her ass, as typical ugly Americans would.
Next up was the monkey and his trainer, both dressed in middle- east garb.
When the trainer placed the monkey’s head into the table opening the animal freaked. The trainer tried to calm the monkey down with little success. The diners were told to hit the monkey on the head as if to kill it. Although the foam mallets were harmless the monkey cried out as if he was being slaughtered. He was a damn good actor. We shot with three cameras and once we got the footage and reaction shots we replaced the monkey with a perfectly sculpted double. One of our makeup guys cracked open the phony skull and it looked like real brains. Our diners showed a range of emotions as they dipped spoons inside the head and nibbled on the” brains”, which were red- dyed cauliflower. If you looked closely you could see a nail holding down the bloody cauliflower. Fortunately, most people weren’t that observant. We had sound problems so we looped the scene and four of the crew supplied the voices. When we reviewed the footage we knew we were onto something. The monkey scene seemed as genuine as the Vernon slaughter house. To this day this is the one segment that people swear is real.
Dog Fights and Near Death
As long as we were descending into the profane, I had the idea to do a segment about dog fighting. We put out the word and after several negotiations and thousands in cash we went to Compton to film a fight. We went to a rundown neighbourhood where roof top lookouts with binoculars kept their eyes open for cops.
Two pit bulls were brought out and they lunged at one another. The hatred was real. We told our contact that we didn’t need a dog to die. Our plan was to squirt mock blood on the dogs to make things look much worse than they were. The dogs were placed in the ring and they went at it. I thought for sure one of them would be killed. The trainers were tough guys and these dogs were even tougher. We kept squirting phony blood over the dogs. One dog collapsed from exhaustion but staggered to his feet seconds later. We stopped the fight before he died. We had plenty of fight footage and it was a perfect place for us to stop filming. We could freeze-frame the dog that collapsed and give the illusion that the dog had died. Besides, some of the locals were getting too close to our equipment truck and it was time to get out of Compton.
We also travelled to Leon Mexico to film cock fights. Unfortunately I came down with “tourista” in the middle of filming. While the other guys filmed I wandered around the parking lot shitting and puking. I thought I would die and wondered if my passing would make an interesting segment. I had been feeling funky the whole day and I knew something was up. The night before we played poker and drank too many shots of tequila and ate pork burritos. I had ignored the rule that while in Mexico be careful what you eat and drink. I paid no attention and now I was paying for it big time. Later that evening our guide gave me some pills and I was back in 24 hours ready to eat and drink everything…well almost everything, until we began our next session of crazed filming.
Such experiences show how much the creation of Faces of Death involved a long hard look at the subject of both morality and mortality from a number of outlooks. As I suggest above, the filmmakers were themselves as much under threat of extinction as the subjects we covered in the movie. Although these recollections in the Cine-Excess journal will form part of a longer project I am currently writing about my experiences of creating the movie, I am glad to have the opportunity here to begin to distinguish some of the facts from the fictions behind Faces of Death.
John A. Schwartz
January 2013