When JLP colleague Dan Partridge and I ventured to Port Townsend, Washington in 2005 to visit Virginia “Gin" Wald (in the loft era she was Gin McEwan) and her husband, the bassist Ted Wald, Gin told us all about the junkie street life she witnessed in NYC in the summer of 1961 with her boyfriend, saxophonist Lin Halliday. She wrote about it movingly in letters to me afterward. We edited her letters, with her editorial approval, for a blog entry a few months ago. Gin said if we wanted to get a feel for her life with Lin then we should watch “Panic in Needle Park."
Pacino played the junkie in that film. On various buses and planes and rental cars (and I think we took a ferry from somewhere to somewhere on that particular Pacific Northwest trip in 2005), Dan Partridge and I tossed around actor names we thought could play Lin Halliday. A year earlier we'd been in Chicago and came across film footage of Lin shot by bassist Dennis Carroll a few years before Lin died. In that footage Lin looked not unlike he looks in the photograph of Lin and Gin made by their daughter which we posted in Gin's blog entry. He looked a little bit younger and healthier than that, but similar. In the footage Lin is smoking cigarettes with all the compulsive mannerisms you'd expect from someone with serious addiction problems. Only Lin seemed to have rounded off all the quick jerks, like a swimmer or dancer or puppeteer. I've been in a lot of bars and pool halls and I've never seen anybody whip around matches and lit cigarettes like Lin. Dan and I figured the actor who could do Lin justice is Johnny Depp.
