The title is taken from a song called “Just Like a Movie Star” by The 6ths. Sal Mineo has always struck me as someone so beautiful, delicate, and surrounded by melancholy, both because of the roles he played but also because of his real life. I think sadness was in his spirit, and he belongs in Queer culture. The image here is a found image of Sal on the beach reading a script for Dino. The image at the top is borrowed from Fritz Lang’s “Scarlet Street.” Lang is one of my favorite directors, and those feet belong to Edward G. Robinson, with whom I am obsessed. Robinson’s public persona is that of someone who played only gangsters, but he was a marvelous actor who played all kinds of roles. In this film he plays a mild-mannered “good guy” who gets swept up in a scheme by a beautiful woman (Joan Bennett). It does not end well for Robinson’s character. The knife, which in a bit of foreshadowing Robinson drops in his kitchen, connects the two disparate scenes, as Sal Mineo was stabbed to death in NYC in 1976. In real life, far from being a gangster, Robinson was cultured, erudite, kind, and a wonderful art collector. An immigrant—his family left Romania after anti-semitic attacks—he was a self-made man. He was also an outspoken critic of Hitler and Nazism. This time period is always important to me because my paternal grandfather was an American soldier in WWII and fought in five major campaigns, and this experience shaped his life and our family life and lore in large ways. I’ve always felt a kinship with Robinson and wished I could have known him.