What I learned from talking to him and from discussing his films in detail has inspired me to investigate unsuspected energy and innovation in sometimes surprising places in Hollywood movies and American television. These journeys have led me to question indiscriminate scholarly contempt for the phenomenon of the couple in American and international entertainment and to excavate the much misunderstood phenomenon of the screen gangster, in, respectively, and Dying to Belong: Gangster Movies in Hollywood and Hong Kong (2007).