Michael, "If you had just a minute to breathe and they granted you one final wish...."

The Boy of the low spark of high heeled boys.

The title refers to an inscription written by the late actor Michael J. Pollard in Jim Capaldi’s book while they were both in Morocco.[1] Capaldi and Pollard were planning to work on a movie that was never filmed. Capaldi said:

Pollard and I would sit around writing lyrics all day, talking about Bob Dylan and the Band, thinking up ridiculous plots for the movie. Before I left Morocco, Pollard wrote in my book ‘The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.’ For me, it summed him up. He had this tremendous rebel attitude. He walked around in his cowboy boots, his leather jacket. At the time he was a heavy little dude. It seemed to sum up all the people of that generation who were just rebels. The ‘Low Spark,’ for me, was the spirit, high-spirited. You know, standing on a street corner. The low rider. The ‘Low Spark’ meaning that strong undercurrent at the street level.[2]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8M8R835Ck4

He played Ross in the 1967 Bonnie & Clyde movie. Ross was actually an amalgam of two or three other members of the Barrow gang.

I read somewhere that it was early in his career, although he’d already done several projects, and it was the first role that required him to eat food in a scene. Evidently no one had told him when there’s a scene with food, you shouldn’t eat all the food during the shooting of the scene, because there’s a likelihood the scene will require multiple takes.

So there’s a scene where the outlaws have kidnapped a couple and are eating their lunch in the car. The scene required a total of 12 takes, by which time Pollard had had to consume eight entire burgers.