NIGHTMARES IN SHADOWS AND SUNLIGHT

Here’s what happens when the need to see takes over and I start pulling DVDs off the shelf with only my dark heart as a guide…

The sleazy, claustrophobic, catch-as-catch-can transience of the carnival world, with its ever-changing roster of freaks, geeks, disappointed con men and women with few options, all clinging to shreds of dignity and eyeing a better life while digging themselves deeper into the one from which they want to flee, seems a naturally cinematic subject. Yet there are surprisingly few movies that have ever captured the symbiotic push-pull of vibrant show-biz fakery and dark personal obsessions that lurk behind the curtain, beyond the barker’s call. Somewhere between the boy’s wish-fulfillment of Toby Tyler and the mind-wrenching funhouse mirror reflections of Tod Browning, Tobe Hooper and Rob Zombie, Edmund Goulding’s film of W.L. Greshman’s Nightmare Alley (1947), from a script by Jules Furthman (reportedly quite faithful to the novel), captures the attraction of the fairway for the suckers and the sham artists running the games, as well as the desperation to trade the sawdust floors of tented arenas for brighter, shinier halls where the sheep waiting to be fleeced have thicker wool and far deeper pockets.

Watching Nightmare Alley today, it’s plain to see that while the divide between the carnies and the upper classes awash in dough is as marked as ever (maybe more so), the desperation for recognition, for reward, is no longer a simple symptom of poverty. But in 1947 it must have been quite a shock to see a handsome star like Tyrone Power give himself over to a role for which audiences wouldn’t have been expected to have much empathy. Power’s opportunistic Stan Carlisle is so thoroughly at home amongst the shadows and hidden compartments of the carnival setting that it’s almost a surprise to hear that he has aspirations beyond it. However, his eagerness to expand his talents to more sophisticated scams for more sophisticated targets soon sucks in both the essentially good-natured Zeena (Joan Blondell) and the relatively innocent Molly (Colleen Gray) into a world where the lies get bigger, thornier, more perverse, and the inevitable fall back to earth is all the more devastating.

Cinematographer Lee Garmes brilliantly conjures the film’s first half in chiaroscuro patterns and recesses formed by the impermanent tents and wagons, all of which coexist almost subconsciously with the ballrooms and theaters of the slightly less compelling second half. But Nightmare Alley’s central power lies in the faces of its actors, the carnival life lived as painted in the creases on their faces, in smiles and banter meant to hide the truth, in haunted looks and, conversely, averted eyes. Joan Blondell is smashing as Zeena, accidentally widowed by Stan’s (subconscious?) enabling of her alcoholic husband. She carries the weight of an entire disappointed life in her big, beautiful, forlorn eyes. 

As for Power, he couldn’t have been, and probably never was better than he was in this movie. Critic Charles Taylor observes about Power’s towering performance that the actor conjures Stan’s essence in that “he manages always to look away from anyone declaring any tenderness for him… His gaze is always fixed on where he’s going.” The commitment which Power, Goulding and Furthman show toward Gresham’s concept of Stan’s corruption is that which Hitchcock could not follow through on in flirting with villainy for Cary Grant in Suspicion. The blasphemous blackness in Stan’s heart is given near full reign down the darkest nightmare-fueled alleys in the film; it sticks its chilling effect in our hearts like a stake pounded into soft ground, a stake meant to anchor a carnival tent in place long enough to provide cover while the movie takes us for all we’re worth.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) has the trappings of an action movie, but the crime investigation at the center of its plot feels more like a Macguffin, a concession to genre that more effectively plays as a diversion leading toward the movie’s ambient incertitude. Its real subject is the tug of war internalized within John Wintergreen (Robert Blake), a Vietnam veteran who returns to life as a motorcycle cop and is (like we are) seduced by the cold sheen imagery and laconic bravado surrounding his post-war profession. Wintergreen is torn between sympathy for the freedom of outlaw bikers and structure and discipline of police work, and Blake’s well-modulated performance—gritty, funny, sympathetic, but hardly pleading—suits the humor and the toughened mettle of a man who may not be big enough (or paranoid enough) for the job.

The visions coaxed to life by Conrad Hall justify Wintergreen’s shifting self-regard— the celebrated director of photography conjures motorcycles cruising through air, warped by heat and compressed by long lenses-- images which have energy and forward thrust, but which are also powered by the ethereal beauty of strange, misplaced beasts in motion. Hall teases out the iconography of motorcycle-powered justice toward a much more ambiguous, unsettling end, intimating a very uneasy ride just ahead.

But director James William Guercio’s movie (his one and only, shot between gigs as producer of the music group Chicago, and featuring some of the band members in minor roles) finds just as much potency in immobility. It’s there in the looming monuments of the country through which those Arizona highways snake and wind. It’s there in the moments of repose when Wintergreen and his partner Zipper Davis (Billy Green Bush) are parked by the side of the asphalt, thinking and talking about everything and nothing. (Hall finds poetry in close Panavision glimpses of the hard gravel and sagebrush along the edges of the highway —you can almost smell the desert dust and feel the heat radiating off the pavement, warping the relentless sunshine.) And it’s there in the movie’s horrifying final image, in which a cop is installed on the road like one of those monuments looming behind him, perhaps as yet another reminder of a bloody American past and the many fallen, aggressors and victims who couldn’t reconcile themselves to a country bent on tearing itself apart. Electra Glide in Blue refashions the countercultural martyrdom of Easy Rider into a blunt blow toward an entire nation profoundly divided, the darkest fate reserved for those who see both sides yet end up in the middle of the road.

Maniac Cop 2 (1990; William Lustig) is mostly disposable junk—it has that signature blue steel sheen once fetishized by John Carpenter and James Cameron and a script that, to my tin ears and eyes at least, makes close to no sense. But even though it was partially shot in Los Angeles, it also makes good use of its nighttime New York City locations. It’s like a time capsule glimpse back to a city that no longer exists, at least not in precisely the same way, and it has a pleasurably scuzzy 42^nd Street vibe. How could it not with Robert Davi’s gruff detective skulking around alleyways, investigating the apparent reappearance of the titular imposing figure of menace? (Davi is so tough, he smokes in hospitals!) 

Fortunately, there’s also Claudia Christian as Davi’s antagonist, a sympathetic cop psychologist who comes to believe the wild stories about a wronged, killed and resurrected cop who’s out there taking out innocents and baddies alike; Bruce Campbell reprising his role as the lead investigator from the first movie (he doesn’t last quite so long this time); Michael Lerner picking up a (small) check as the corrupt police commissioner; Clarence Williams III finding one good note and playing it into the sunset as a loony death row inmate; and Leo Rossi hamming it up as a bushy-haired serial killer who befriends Cordell, the Maniac Cop, essayed as always (there was a third one, you know) by B-movie stalwart Robert Z’Dar, he of the hulking frame and XXL lantern jaw. Z’Dar sports the worst scary makeup job of all time, but at least he-- or, more accurately, his stuntman-- gets in some top-notch asbestos suit time when he gets set on fire near the end of the picture. 

(Asbestos suit stunts are among my favorites, yet another harkening back to a more "innocent" age of filmmaking where if you wanted to show a guy on fire, you couldn’t decorate him with pixels, you had to really set him on fire… and all that protective outerwear still makes a giant like Z’Dar’s Cordell look like going up in flames somehow caused him to instantly gain about 75 pounds.)

Christian-- or, more accurately, her stuntwoman— also gets a rousing action set piece about half an hour in when the Maniac Cop handcuffs her to a steering wheel and sets the car in high-speed motion down a crowded boulevard. It’s easily the highlight of the movie, especially if you don’t stop to think about who’s keeping the car hurtling forward with their foot on the gas. (Answer: no one.) After that it’s pretty much downhill (the movie, not the car—that would’ve explained things) straight toward the rote gory shoot-‘em-up, stab-‘em-up, set’-em-on-fire conclusion, which is topped, as many thought-disabled genre pictures have been since Carrie White and Michael Meyers and Jason Voorhees rose from the dead, by the usual jolt that screams "Sequel!" 

Maniac Cop 2 isn’t even close to good, but it’s the most well-paced and acted of the movies in the Cordell saga made so far, and its violence, though ridiculous and once considered on the extreme side, now seems almost period quaint. (Rumors that Nicholas Winding Refn was set to direct a Maniac Cop prequel seem to have dissipated, maybe because the grue-minded auteur never figured out a way to one-up the original’s enthusiastic scuzz factor.) You could chuck a dismembered limb or flame-charred skull in any direction and hit a far better movie, but as brainless, gory action-horror hybrids go you could also hit far worse (like Maniac Cop 3, for example). For all its clunky echoes of The Terminator and scores of other superior low-budget action thrillers, Maniac Cop 2 does manage to leave some grimy stains and a not entirely unpleasant aftertaste of its own. It's the B-movie equivalent of a bong shot of Ripple guzzled near a Dumpster behind a strip bar, which at times, by the adjusted standards of the grindhouse anyway, gets within shouting distance of mean, dirty, stupid fun.

A night flight through a darkened wood opens Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960) with a heightened pulse—a woman races down a deserted highway eyeing her rear-view mirror, fearful of the intent of cars approaching from behind but also keeping an eye on the passenger in the back seat. Soon the passenger, hidden in a too-big trench coat and hat, slumps forward, and the movie begins its steep descent into the interior of a twisted morality well worthy of being cloaked in a dark forest of secrets. A French-Italian coproduction released in Europe in 1960 (the same year Psycho was released) but not seen in the U.S. until two years later, Eyes Without a Face plays like a Grand Guignol fairy tale with imagery that, unlike the unforgiving slashes and sharp angles of Hitchcock’s landmark, seeps into the viewer’s subconscious with poetic assurance and smears the boundaries of our sympathies at the same time.

In an isolated mansion somewhere in that darkened wood a surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) familiar with past glories has instigated an escalating series of skin graft experiments in a desperate attempt to restore the face of his young daughter (Edith Scob), horribly disfigured in a car accident. The surgeon kidnaps young Parisian girls to use as unwilling epidermal donors with the help of his devoted assistant (Alida Valli), a former patient whose own successful facial reconstruction has blinded her to her savior’s madness. Given the elusive, seductive strangeness of the movie’s surrealist mise-en-scène, 21st-century viewers might be surprised at the film’s notorious centerpiece, a shockingly clinical surgical scene in which Franju’s camera barely glances away from the horrific procedure being performed, and then only to scan the landscape of moral conflict glistening like cold sweat across the faces of the doctor and his helper. But perhaps even more unsettling and ultimately frightening is the degree to which Franju allows us access not only to sympathy for the victims, but also for the daughter, whose dawning realization of what her father is doing might be as devastating as her own disfigurement, and even for the surgeon and his assistant, their genial manner and misguided, sincere love for the girl incapable of coexisting with their heinous deeds. 

The movie is a masterpiece of raised goose flesh. Even during the film’s most ostensibly placid moments Franju burrows under our skin with image and sound— over unadorned tracking shots of the girl moving aimlessly through the empty halls of the house a faint, insistent, inexplicable barking can be heard, soon revealed as coming from the basement of the house, where the doctor’s very first victims are still penned. If Eyes Without a Face ends on a note of release best suited for a fairy tale it is a grim tale indeed, tainted by blood, destroyed loyalties and the prospect of a bleak future of isolation, as if a masked, faceless sleeping beauty had escaped the evil queen and made her way into the woods to find only suffocating darkness where magic should reside.

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OUT OF PRINT: THE NEW BEVERLY'S HISTORY

The title of Julia Marchese’s testimonial documentary on the history of Los Angeles’ the New Beverly Cinema, Out of Print, began, as her film did, as a way of suggesting the dark future which lay in store for the prospect of 35mm film distribution and exhibition in the early stages of this decade’s industry switch-over to digital projection. Marchese’s movie sprung from efforts to rally behind not only the viability of the film format in the face of the movie business’s growing infatuation with all things ones-and-zeroes, but also the viability of theaters like the New Beverly Cinema, the city’s longest-surviving repertory theater, which in 2013, around the time the film began production, saw the availability of 35mm prints, the bread-and-butter of the few independent revival houses across the country still in business, dwindling. These theaters were given a simple, expensive choice: cough up perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for the conversion to digital, or close up shop. The industry itself, it seemed, would soon be out of prints.

(The theater in my hometown, staring down exactly this choice, boarded up in March 2014 and, current vigorous community efforts notwithstanding, remains shut down four years later.)

Out of Print slowly came together over the course of about a year, evolving from its origins as a love letter to 35mm and into a sort of oral history of what Marchese, and many others like her, loved even more than images on celluloid—the New Beverly itself. She rounded up a who’s-who of high profile fans of the theater, like directors Joe Dante, Rian Johnson, Edgar Wright, Stuart Gordon and John Landis, and also made room for a passel of below-the-line New Beverly regulars to tell their tales as well. My favorites: the wistful considerations of New Beverly mainstays like actor Clu Gulager, who had a plaque with his name on it installed on his favorite seat; and Freddie Gillette, former limo driver for Orson Welles, who has more stories than he could ever possibly tell (which, of course, will never keep him from trying); 

and the quick-witted and entirely charming Gariana Abeyta, former projectionist at the Cinefamily who proclaims, deadpan tongue in cheek, that her relationship with the New Beverly is “primarily sexual.”  (The fate of the Cinefamily itself, another Los Angeles specialty cinema now closed for reasons having nothing to do with exhibition formats, gives Abeyta’s wisecrack an unintended frisson of irony to go along with the laugh.)

All of these folks are united by their mutual love for what amounts to a treasured Los Angeles institution, and they supply rich veins of impassioned observation and amusing anecdotes, as well as some emotionally charged remembrances of the revival theater’s humble origins under the loving care of its original caretaker, Sherman Torgan, who died unexpectedly in 2007. Those who don’t know the theater or who are only marginally interested in the enthusiasms that are the meat-and-potatoes of Marchese’s tribute, which started screening for festivals and began its streaming life in the latter part of 2014, may find the plethora of talking heads on the indulgent side. But those for whom the New Beverly is more than just another theater will find plenty to enjoy here, and plenty to be saddened by as well.

For just as the movie started to become widely available, another chapter in the history of the New Beverly Cinema abruptly began to unfold. After ably taking over in the wake of his father’s death, hands-on shepherding the theater for seven years, Michael Torgan, who booked the films and dealt with almost every aspect of the theater’s day-to-day, night-to-night operation, was summarily replaced by the landlord, Quentin Tarantino, who had himself years earlier saved the theater from being sold off and turned into a Supercuts by buying it himself. Tarantino was self-installed as the ostensible new heart and soul of the New Beverly, sending waves of shock and surprise throughout the Los Angeles film community, who knew the Torgan family’s history as one of the city’s most important forces in the preservation of the revival theater experience. The new uncertainty about the New Beverly’s future, and especially the unceremonious handling of Torgan’s position which precipitated the “transition,” cast an entirely new light on Out of Print and what the existence of the movie as a document of the New Beverly might suddenly mean. (You can read my thoughts on what happened, with links to several outlying news stories and interviews with Tarantino himself, by clicking here— and be sure to stay for the comments.)

Approximately three-and-a-half years after what amounts to the repertory cinema equivalent of a palace coup, the New Beverly is still around. But in that time, Tarantino’s tastes as a programmer and the reliance on his own vast collection of film prints have turned the theater into something akin to his own personal grindhouse. When they are even featured, the appearance of eclectic double bills of classic Hollywood and foreign staples and deep cuts, once the New Beverly’s bread-and-butter, now feel more like token nods to the theater’s past than a vital element of its programming, having been pushed aside in favor of Italian gangster, western and horror obscurities, cheap kung fu thrillers and 90’s mall-plex nostalgia. (The theater recently segregated those musty Hollywood classics into a Wednesday afternoon programming showcase.)

As a result, Out of Print, in what feels like only the time it takes to pass 24 frames past a projector lamp, has gone from a celebration of a family legacy to a sad remembrance, and perhaps it is that sense of loss which gives the movie even more resonance that it might otherwise have had. As regards the heart of the format debate, Marchese, a fierce defender of 35mm herself, had to refashion her film to recognize that the digital revolution had already been won even before her production wrapped, that film vs. digital would never be an all-or-nothing affair, that both formats could and should co-exist, a sentiment that the old New Beverly had already acknowledged.

 Though currently (and apparently indefinitely) closed while undergoing renovations, business has reportedly been robust for the theater under the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s tutelage, while the refusal to acknowledge the digital revolution in any way still fuels the theater’s overriding sensibility. However, after almost four years the new New Beverly’s 35mm-or-bust attitude seems to have also limited the scope of the programming in ways that have nothing to do with whether or not 35mm is a superior format over digital. Of course, one cannot love revival cinema, in Los Angeles or anywhere else, without wishing the current gatekeepers of the New Beverly Cinema well. But seeing Out of Print now makes painfully apparent, for those who once did and still do call the New Beverly home, the demarcation which exists between the theater’s past and its present, the suspicion that though the theater still thrives something perhaps intangible, like dissipating light from a projector beam cast on dust and smoke, has indeed been lost. 

In the interests of full disclosure (in case it wasn’t already plainly obvious), the New Beverly Cinema has meant a great deal to me for a long time. In fact, I am one of those below-the-line folks interviewed in Out of Print. Though I’d had a DVD copy for a couple of years, I had put off seeing the movie until last weekend because I didn’t really relish seeing myself in it, and also because I suspected it would be an uncomfortable experience in light of what happened just after it was made. 

But for me the sadness was leavened considerably by seeing my kids in the movie as well—I took them along with me frequently to see everything from Modern Times and The General to pictures like Ace in the Hole, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Fiddler on the Roof, Kansas City Confidential, The Lady Eve and dozens more, and their history with the theater has ended up well documented here as well. There’s a great still in the movie of Nonie out in front of the theater, plastic fangs in place, getting ready for a double bill of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and The Fearless Vampire Killers, as well as a shot, which brought tears to my eyes, of the drawings Emma made depicting herself, me and Michael outside the theater that were displayed at the entrance past the box office for years after she gave them to him. So, I thought for me the best way to expand upon Marchese’s history of my New Bev, as well as the theater itself, would be to share some of the stories about what the theater has meant to me, stories which I originally posted when the theater’s future was very much in doubt. I’ve only been back three or four times since Tarantino took over, but I scan each monthly schedule nonetheless, looking for more reasons to head back. In the meantime, allow me to return in my own way.

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THE FIRST MOVIES I EVER SAW IN LOS ANGELES WERE…  Less than a year after I graduated from college, a friend and I ventured south from Oregon to Los Angeles with vague hopes of trying to find work in the movie business-- #1 piece of advice: Don’t try to break into the movie business during what amounts to an extended two-week vacation. Though we did manage to wrangle an audience with producer Mary Anne Fisher at the old Venice location of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures (we even showed her some super-8 movies we’d made), the trip was basically a chance to screw off and see movies. And the first ones we saw were a double bill of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Eraserhead (1977) at— where else? —the New Beverly Cinema. Especially for two hayseed boys from small-town Southern Oregon, the theater had a strange, sinister run-down vibe that was, of course, exacerbated by the skeevy terror of the films themselves, and I remember being constantly aware of my surroundings, as if I seriously questioned whether we’d make it out of there alive. We did. But if you’d have told me in the spring of 1982 that I’d be taking my own daughter to see movies there some 37 years later, I might have suggested driving to the nearest hospital for an emergency vasectomy. Especially after seeing Eraserhead.

UPON RETURNING TO LOS ANGELES FOR GOOD IN 1987, the New Beverly became a favored destination for me and my best pal Bruce, as well as other friends I would quickly make. I remember a screening of Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka (1983) during which Bruce and I discovered the one section in the middle of the auditorium from which the foul reek of stale piss was inescapable. The fact that the house was packed (Packed! On a Wednesday night! For a notorious Nicolas Roeg flop! This place must be some sort of heaven!) meant that we had to sit tight and stick our heads in our popcorn bags for any hope of relief. Avoiding that section in the future, I saw greats like Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), Manhattan (1979), Red River (1948) and Ride the High Country (1962) with other friends, including the woman who would soon become my wife. And one night I faced up to one of my major bucket-list fears and bought a ticket for Salo: the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).  Like the horrific stench of stale piss, there was no escape from Pasolini’s tortured vision either. (Fear not, motif hounds—I shall return to the urine theme a bit later, though, believe it or not, in a much happier context. And by the way, just for the record, that smell has long since been vanquished from the auditorium!)

FOR TEN YEARS FROM APPROXIMATELY 1997 to 2007, I FELL OUT OF THE HABIT OF GOING TO THE NEW BEVERLY CINEMA. But I had a pal at work who was becoming a regular and who was constantly encouraging me to attend the occasional Grindhouse Night with her, those special sojourns into the scurrilous world of low-rent genre cinema that would soon become a twice-monthly staple of New Beverly Tuesday nights. I was constantly begging off, having recently had two daughters of my own and experiencing firsthand the life- and scheduling-altering effects of parenthood. I’d been writing this blog for three years when she finally talked me into it. The first Grindhouse Festival, designed by Quentin Tarantino as a simultaneous homage to the trash classics he loved but also as a cross-promotional opportunity for the upcoming Grindhouse (2007) double feature, got under way in March of 2007. I seized the chance to write about the event for this site, specifically about the two double features I managed to attend-- John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder (1977) and Charles B. Pierce’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976), and then a few weeks later Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), starring Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson, doubled with Richard Lerner’s Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976)-- in a piece entitled "Sex and Violence x2: Grindhouse Report 2007." And I was off, again, and running.

IF WE’RE LUCKY, WE GET TO HAVE A HANDFUL OF GREAT THEATRICAL EXPERIENCES IN OUR MOVIEGOING LIVES, and during that stretch from 2007, when I started my habit anew, to this year, 2014, the New Beverly has afforded me seemingly more than my share. There was the night, during Edgar Wright’s second “Wright Stuff” festival, when John Landis, who replaced Wright at the last minute, hosted a screening of National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and, to my initial horror, called me out during his introduction to talk about my experience as an extra on that film in front the whole house. (He asked if I thought he’d been a nice guy to work for, and when I answered in the positive he proclaimed, “Well, then I can reveal now that you’re the main reason for the movie’s success!”)

During that stretch I also had the chance to see several of my favorite Robert Altman films projected, including Brewster McCloud, Thieves Like Us and The Long Goodbye. Most thrilling, however, were the exquisite prints I saw on a M*A*S*H (1970)/California Split (1974) double feature about three years ago, bested only by the chance to see Nashville (1975) again last fall, just prior to Criterion’s gorgeous Blu-ray release, after a long period of not seeing it theatrically. It was even more exciting because I saw the film with two friends who had never seen it before. And yes, we spent some time in the lobby afterwards, with Michael, talking about just how astonishing the movie remains nearly 40 years after it was released, and how even more prescient it seems in the current light of day.

I’ll never forget seeing Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages (1922) on a double feature with Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943) a few years ago, just weeks before Halloween. The hallucinatory brilliance of the double feature (how many more programs like this can we reasonably expect without Michael Torgan’s influence?) was capped perfectly when I made my way out into the lobby afterward, only to see Julia stumbling down the stairs from the projection booth, a dazed look on her face. When she saw me she muttered, “That’s the freakiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Did you like that?!” Equally memorable, the transcendent Sansho the Bailiff (1954; Kenji Mizoguchi), which I’d never seen before, and which unspooled in its haunted splendor before me and about 10 other paying customers on a Friday night. When I stopped to thank Michael for showing it, he could not hide his disappointment that so few patrons, even among the New Beverly faithful, seemed willing to give the movie a chance.

AND THERE WERE THE GREAT, LO-O-O-O-O-O-O-ONG SITS that made me forever grateful for the theater’s seat replacement program, in which the tiny, beat-up fold-down seats were replaced by much nicer, cushier, back-friendly ones—with cup holders!— in 2008.  It was a real privilege to spend my first riveting and unforgettable experience with Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976; Chantal Akerman) in the company of my pal Maria, on whose urging I decided to finally come to terms with this unique and brilliant film myself. 

Slighty longer than that, though considerably more action-packed, was a midnight screening of Tarantino’s own personal answer print of Inglorious Basterds (2009), hosted by the loquacious director himself, which started a half-hour late and was preceded by 45 minutes’ worth of WWII movie trailers also brought in by the director—which meant that the nearly three-hour feature didn’t get started until about 1:00 a.m. The usual gathering in the lobby to hash out the experience got under way at about 4:00 a.m., and I didn’t leave for home for another half-hour, remembering all the way to my car and all the way home how I used to do this sort of thing all the time in college, and it never seemed as devastating to my system, or my need for sleep, as it did in this moment. 

However, easily the longest and the most pleasurable of all was the opportunity I took a couple years ago to avail myself of a New Beverly pre-New Year’s tradition: a seven-hour (with bathroom break between features) double bill of The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), perhaps the most devastating and thrilling of all American epics. To see it unspool in such close proximity, at full attention, was a singular thrill. I’d pulled this stunt once in the VHS days as a particularly perverse Thanksgiving treat to myself, but there’s nothing like the power of Coppola’s films unleashed in a theater, sans distractions—not even a peep from a cell phone, as I recall-- to make you appreciate their true, unforgiving power.

BUT AS GREAT EXPERIENCES IN A MOVIE THEATER GO, whether at the New Beverly or anywhere else, it’s hard to beat these three in my personal book. In April of 2008 I topped off the first of two interviews with director Joe Dante, who has always been one of my favorites, with a cornucopia of treats he offered at his first “Dante’s Inferno” Film Festival at the New Beverly. There were several highlights, of course, including Dante’s superb Matinee (1993) and his hilarious, politically astute satire The Second Civil War (1997), but nothing could possibly top the first screening in 40 years of Dante’s legendary, lunatic masterwork The Movie Orgy (1968), compiled with producer/friend Jon Davison during their college days (and featuring an extended with Andy Devine and his gang, seen above). The screening was free thanks to the multiple rights violations within the program itself, making it illegal to charge admission, and it was packed to the gills, taking on the feel of a true underground phenomenon. More an experience than a movie, The Movie Orgy almost defies description, which as you’ll see in my piece "Joe Dante's New Beverly Movie Orgy" in no way stopped me from trying.  (This was the evening during which I was first introduced to Michael Torgan as well. A big night indeed!)

Only about six months later, it was time for another one of those “I never thought I’d ever see this” kinds of nights that the New Beverly was becoming very generous in providing. Staged in part as a tribute to actress Wendie Jo Sperber, who died in 2005 from breast cancer, and a fund- and awareness-raiser for WeSpark, the breast cancer foundation, the New Beverly staged a double bill of epic proportions featuring Sperber and many, many others-- I Wanna Hold Your Hand! (1978) and one of my favorite films of all time, Steven Spielberg's unjustly maligned 1941 (1979), both of which were written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale. (The former was also Zemeckis’ first directing gig.) The stage was packed with veterans of the Zemeckis/Gale stock company, including Gale himself, actress Nancy Allen and actor-director Perry Lang, who staged a great Q&A before 1941 that was worthy of its own DVD audio commentary track. I was especially thrilled to be able to participate in that Q&A and express my unalloyed love for both movies, but Spielberg’s in particular. In my piece "Fire At That Large Industrial Structure: A 1941 Postscript," I talk about the night, which had both an unexpected beginning and a transcendent grace note of a finish.

Those were brilliant nights to be sure, but I don't think anything could match what my friend Don Mancini and I managed to pull off two years later, just before Halloween 2010. The one and only time the name of this blog was ever attached to a movie event was this one, and it was a real honor to have had a hand in making it happen. We commandeered two nights on the New Beverly schedule for what, in our eyes at least, was a terrific double bill— Jaume Collett-Serra’s genuinely frightening Orphan (2009) coupled with Don’s very own misunderstood orphan, Seed of Chucky (2005). The first night was dedicated to the cast and crew of Orphan, including the film’s screenwriter David Leslie Johnson and the unnervingly self-possessed and talented star of the film, Esther herself, Isabelle Fuhrmann, all featured in a Q&A hosted by Don. Night two was dedicated to the spawn of Charles Lee Ray, with Don, actors Jennifer Tilly, Steve West and Debbie Lee Carrington, and producer Corey Sienega all on stage for a Q&A moderated by Face/Off screenwriter Mike Werb. It was a chance to stand up for a couple of horror movies that are much better, more frightening and, in the case of Seed more deliberately funny and satirically sharp than they are usually given credit for, and I think we took 100% advantage of the opportunity to kick-start the buffing-up of both their reputations with this event—and I got to meet (and sit down for dinner with) Jennifer Tilly! Read all about it, and see the Q&As themselves, in my piece "The Seed of Chucky/Orphan Q&As."

OVER THE PAST SEVEN YEARS I’VE MADE MUCH IN THESE PAGES ABOUT THE NEW BEVERLY FAMILY AFFAIR, and though it might sound like a sentimental cliché it really is true, in a couple of different ways. I’ve never felt the sense of bonding over movie love as strongly anywhere else as I have at this theater, and that has everything to do with seeing the same engaged, excited faces at screening after screening, ready to soak up whatever unknown or happily familiar sights and sounds that would be spilling off the screen on any given night. And I’ve met so many people who have become an important, indispensable part of the Los Angeles filmgoing scene that I’ve been welcomed into since 2007. I introduced myself to Anne Thompson for the first time at a screening of Richard Brooks’ Wrong is Right in 2008— astoundingly, she knew about my blog already and has been an ardent supporter of my writing ever since. 

Among the other people I’ve become acquainted with at the New Beverly include fellow writers Peter Avellino, Jeremy Smith and Jen Yamato, filmmakers Brian Crewe, Joe Dante, Matt Dinan, Marion Kerr, Julia Marchese, Peter Podgursky and Edgar Wright, extraordinary and erudite film fanatics like John Damer, Marc Edward Heuck, Cathie Horlick, Jeff McMahon, Brian Quinn and producer/classic film specialist Michael Schlesinger, film archivist Ariel Schudson, as well as all-around good souls and New Bev fixtures like Corky Baines , Freddie, and of course Clu Gulager. If ever one needed and coveted a family of like-minded filmheads, this is a pretty glorious group with which to start.

And as I stated earlier, Michael and the New Beverly always found a way to make my family feel as though the place was our second home. One evening we found ourselves on the way home from the Westside and my youngest daughter Nonie, as often happens to young kids, was seized by an urgent need to take a whiz. We just happened to be passing the theater on Beverly Boulevard, so I whipped around, pulled in front of the theater and asked if she could use the pottie. While I waited for her to finish, I talked with some of the staff and Michael even gave Nonie a hot dog for the ride home. Try pulling that off at your local AMC mall-tiplex. (See how I returned to that urine motif? Told you I would.)

BUT FOR US THE FAMILY CONNECTION GOES DEEPER than the well-timed availability of the ladies’ room. Round about 2008 I began making a concerted effort to encourage my kids’ interest in classic films, and the New Beverly played a hugely important role in that time and aspect of their young lives. As a dad hoping to instill reverence and love for all sorts of movies in his kids, the theater provided an opportunity that was just too rich and varied to pass up. I started them both off with a kiddie Halloween matinee of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966), and we were off to the races. Nonie joined us on occasion, but more often it was Emma accompanying me for a wide variety of great double features, including Kansas City Confidential (1952) and 99 River Street (1953), during which she cultivated a short-lived Jack Elam impersonation,  Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and Christmas in July, (1940), The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), from which Nonie’s popular head shot was cultivated, Modern Times (1936) and The General (1926), Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) and  Coogan’s Bluff (1968), and other great movies like Ace in the Hole (1950), The Blue Dahlia (1946), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), Fiddler on the Roof (1971), and The Palm Beach Story (1942).

Emma had a personal revelation with the hilarity of the Marx Brothers when I took her to see a double feature of Duck Soup (1933) and Animal Crackers (1931)—I wrote about it in a piece entitled "Duck Soup-- Funniest Movie Ever?", and another one when director Rian Johnson, working on a theme of cons in the movies, introduced her to the ostensibly strange but beautifully modulated double bill of The Lady Eve (1941) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen  (1988). (I thanked Johnson, and received a nice response back, in a post entitled "An Open Letter to Rian Johnson.")

And we had a great time together as a family for two Halloweens running, with me dressing up in totally white vampire egghead mode the first year for The Invisible Man (1933) and The Wolf Man (1941), and then the next year working a subtle variation on the bald, totally red-headed Satan, Nonie as his unaccountably lovely daughter/minion, for a double feature of Island of Lost Souls (1932) and Them! (1954). The second year’s bonus is that we entered the New Beverly Halloween Costume Contest, judged by the audience and emcee Joe Dante, and Nonie and I kicked ass, taking first prize, a pass card worth 16 free admissions! It was worth the brutal Lava soap scrub-down I had to endure to get myself clean when we finally made it home.

But Michael and the New Beverly saved the best for a couple of birthday celebrations. For my 50^th birthday in 2010, Michael generously offered to let me program the double feature to be shown on my birthday date that year, and the pairing I chose—You Only Live Twice (1967), my favorite of all the Bond movies, alongside Ken Russell’s Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the third in the Michael Caine/Harry Palmer series, which I’d never seen projected, was the perfect combination. 

And earlier that same year, through Michael’s seemingly endless generosity, we threw Emma’s 10th birthday party in the theater on a rainy Saturday morning, with a magician, free popcorn and sodas, pizzas hauled over from Domino’s by Michael and myself, and a screening of Emma’s movie choice, Cats and Dogs (2001). To this day I can’t think of this party and how much it meant to me and my family without getting emotionally overwhelmed. We carved out a one-of-a-kind memory for my movie-crazy daughter that day, and I will be forever in Michael’s debt for facilitating such an amazing experience for her. You can read all about it in my post entitled "Wanna Be the Daughter of Dracula..."

Thank you, Michael, and thank you, New Beverly Cinema, for some of the most memorable, meaningful experiences my family and I have ever had in a movie theater.

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The DVD of Out of Print is available through Amazon.com and can also be seen on Amazon Streaming and several other streaming services. As they used to say, check your local listings.

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THE SLIFR GUIDE TO DRIVE-IN MOVIES PART 2: AIP AND 13 NOTABLE DRIVE-IN MAESTROS

(This piece originally appeared as part of a larger primer on drive-in movies that was originally published online at Green Cine Daily on June 23, 2008 and is reprinted here, with updates and revisions, with the permission of the site administrators.)

Of all the companies that produced pictures primarily for the drive-in market, none did so with as much brio or thrived because of that market with quite the tenacity and bravado of American International Pictures. Founded by former film salesman James H. Nicholson and an entertainment lawyer by the name of Samuel Z. Arkoff, AIP dedicated itself to providing inexpensive exploitation fare of interest primarily to the teenagers who populated drive-ins in the '50s, '60s and the early part of the '70s.

Some of the key early personnel at American International Pictures responsible for helping to develop the company's signatures of lurid content and creative thrift were producer and director Roger Corman and writers Charles B. Griffith, Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Cinematographer Floyd Crosby, who shot High Noon, added the vivid, sometimes garish and exciting look of many of American International Pictures hits, often working in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio that lent an extra patina of style to the stories of bikers, beach parties and monsters on the loose that made up the AIP menu. And more often than not the movies were graced by the scores of jazz composer Les Baxter.

In an attempt to keep their finger on the pulse of that teenage market, Arkoff and AIP were at the forefront of some pioneering seat-of-the pants marketing strategies. They would frequently poll exhibitors (some of whom were among those who provided the financing for AIP's low-budget slate of pictures) as to the appeal of certain titles of pictures that had yet to be made. If the reaction was lukewarm, the title would be scrapped. But if exhibitors liked the sound of a particular title, Arkoff would then commission a script from a writer, having no idea what the actual story would be.

In this same vein, AIP was the first film company to use focus groups to determine what their teenage audience was interested in, what stories, stars and titles they would pay to see. A typical production schedule on an AIP film might start with the origin of the title, followed by a typically lurid and exciting poster designed by resident art director Albert Kallis, who supervised the AIP art department from 1955 to 1973. The poster was used to raise the cash to make the movie, which only then would be written and finally cast.

Based on this philosophy derived from insistently polling their teen audiences, Arkoff developed a fairly keen showman's sense of what his audience wanted and expected from an American International Picture. After producing a prodigious slate of low-budget thrillers and horror movies in the late '50s, the company hit its stride in three genres that virtually defined the teen movie of the '60s - the "Beach Party" films starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon;; the Roger Corman "Poe Cycle," a series of lavish adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories which often had only the title in common with their literary source; and a wildly popular, and to some extent culture-defining spate of biker pictures, beginning with Corman's The Wild Angels in 1966, an antiheroic genre which then gave rise to a slate of psychedelic head movies like The Trip, Wild in the Streets and Psych-Out.

Without the foundation laid by these pictures, there likely would have been no Easy Rider, a non-AIP biker film starring AIP favorite Peter Fonda which adapted the biker formula to a more open-ended narrative template that incorporated more casual drug use, and even drug trafficking, and in the process became one of the major catalysts for changing the way commercial films were financed and made in America in the early 1970s. American International Pictures also provided the distribution for many of the Toho Godzilla movies of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as numerous other Japanese science fiction films like Frankenstein Conquers the World,  Destroy All Monsters! and Yog! Monster from Space. Throw a rock during the 1960s and 1970s and you would likely hit a drive-in playing one of these AIP releases.

A BAKER'S DOZEN OF NOTABLE DRIVE-IN DIRECTORS

American International Pictures was crucial to the popularity of drive-ins during this time, to be sure, but it was not the only force to be reckoned with. RKO Pictures, Embassy Pictures, Allied Artists and even Universal Pictures cast an eye toward the teenage drive-in market too, as well as countless other companies and independent producers, all financing hundreds of B-movie westerns, sci-fi thrillers, monster movies and cheap crime dramas to be displayed at ozoners under the stars all across the country. And within this wide-ranging drive-in "genre," for those who were watching closely, a few names kept popping up as the words "Directed by" flew by in a drive-in movie's opening credits.

They populated outdoor screens with their singular exploitation grandeur during the heyday of the '50s and '60s all the way through the leaner times of the '70s, and in some cases right up through the near-extinction of the drive-in in the '80s and '90s. Here's a brief baker's dozen list of great-- okay, some not so great. Let's just say, here's a brief list of 13 notable drive-in directors and some of the highlights of their prolific and sometimes disreputable careers.

AL ADAMSON Adamson founded Independent-International Pictures in the early 1960s, a company he used to distribute many of the pictures he directed (cobbled together) himself. He gained a reputation as a go-for-broke, inept filmmaker of little taste, and though he never directed anything close to a classic, the movies Adamson made were staples of the drive-in scene. Some of his most well-known horror titles include Psycho-A-Go-Go (1965), Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970) and the famously awful Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), though he also dipped into blaxploitation with The Dynamite Brothers (1974), Black Heat (1976) and Black Samurai (1977) starring genre icon Jim Kelly; biker movies with Satan's Sadists (1969); and the female service-worker sub-genres with The Naughty Stewardesses (1975) and The Possession of Nurse Sherri (1975).

JACK ARNOLD Though he was a frequent presence in TV, Arnold's reputation as a drive-in director of major import was cemented by five era-defining sci-fi creature films released by Universal: It Came from Outer Space (1953), one of the seminal sci-fi paranoia thrillers, originally presented in 3-D (though not at drive-ins); the original Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954; also presented in 3-D) and its first sequel, Revenge of the Creature (1955); the spectacular giant-spider-on-the-loose horror of Tarantula; and perhaps his best film, the existentially eerie The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), based on Richard Matheson's screenplay. Other Arnold drive-in classics include the essential High School Confidential (1958) starring Russ Tamblyn, Mamie van Doren and Jerry Lee Lewis,, the forgettable Monster on the Campus (1958), and the moody and terrific Audie Murphy western No Name on the Bullet (1959). Arnold also directed the early Peter Sellers comedy The Mouse That Roared (1959). After a decade and a half of almost exclusive work for TV, Arnold took one more stab at the drive-in market with 1975's Boss Nigger, a blaxploitation western written by Fred Williamson, starring Williamson, D'Urville Martin and William Smith. And today Arnold’s reputation is enjoying yet another upswing, with many cinephiles classifying his work, in a category coined by critic Andrew Sarris in his seminal book The American Cinema, as a “subject for further consideration.”

PAUL BARTEL As an actor, Paul Bartel racked up nearly 100 different appearances in roles big and small on TV and in movies like Piranha (1978), Hollywood Boulevard (1976) and Rick and Roll High School (1979). The very recognizable Brooklyn-born director made his feature debut as a filmmaker in 1972 with Private Parts, a downright weird horror comedy that would set the tone for much of his career. But if Private Parts set the tone, his next release cemented his status in the drive-in firmament. Death Race 200 (1975), directed for Roger Corman's New World Pictures, was a smash hit in drive-ins and walk-ins and has remained one of the quintessential drive-in B-movies ever made. Bartel made one more picture for Corman and the drive-in crowd, Cannonball, a blatant knock-off of Death Race 2000 (and competitor on the nation's screens that summer with a similarly themed action comedy, The Gumball Rally), before taking a six-year break from directing. He came back in 1982, however, with Eating Raoul, another black comedy that was a sizable hit and put him on the art house map. The movies he subsequently made before his death in 2000, especially Lust in the Dust (1984), starring Divine and Tab Hunter, belied the fact that the drive-in never left his soul.

LARRY COHEN A prolific TV writer throughout the '60s, Cohen made his caustic, hard-edged debut as a director with the satirical Bone (1972) starring Yaphet Kotto. Cohen's gritty grindhouse sensibility flourished in urban centers and drive-ins alike, and it informed his subsequent blaxploitation features, the unusually observant and socially conscious Black Caesar (1973) and its rather less successful sequel Hell Up in Harlem (1973). (Cohen tried reviving the genre with stalwarts Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Ron O'Neal and Richard Roundtree, with decidedly mixed results, in 1996's Original Gangstas.) But if Cohen's brutal, paranoid trilogy of killer-baby movies, It's Alive (1974), It Lives Again (1978) and the direct-to-video It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987) were his highest-profile pictures, they never defined his boundaries within the world of genre filmmaking. Cohen remained true to his exploitation roots with such oddities as the horror comedy Full Moon High (1981), the flying Aztec creature epic Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), which many consider a genre masterpiece, and even the anti-corporate horror satire The Stuff, about the carnage left in the wake of the unleashing of a killer frozen dessert. But perhaps Cohen's most legendary movies are The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), an irreverent tabloid biopic starring Broderick Crawford in the title role, and most especially 1974's brutal theologically tinged psychological drama God Told Me To (1976), in which Cohen uses the narrative of a series of apparently motiveless murders to contemplate, of all things, the existence of God and the validity of religious belief. Cohen's movies are nothing if not prime examples of how exploitation films can move beyond their own ragged standards and sometimes achieve pulp poetry.

ROGER CORMAN Roger Corman helped to define the drive-in movie at American International Pictures and was one of the most prolific directors of B movies during the drive-in's most popular era. Sci-fi/horror concoctions like The Day the World Ended (1955), It Conquered the World (1956), Not of This Earth (1957) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) are signature examples from the genre that he directed. However, Corman never restricted himself to one genre-- he made westerns (Gunslinger, 1956), teen dramas (Rock All Night, 1956), adventures (The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, 1957), mobster thrillers (Machine Gun Kelly, 1958) and even movies about the troubled lives of teenage cavemen (Teenage Caveman, 1958). He enjoyed a big hit with his 1959 satire on the pretensions of the bohemian art crowd, Bucket of Blood, starring a young hepcat named Dick Miller as Walter Paisley, a struggling artist who murders women and turns their corpses into critically acclaimed sculptures, and followed soon after with another outrageous horror satire, The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) featuring a then-unknown Jack Nicholson in a cameo appearance.

But it was in that same year of 1960 that Corman unleashed the first in what was to become a series of luridly vivid adaptations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, or more accurately the adaptation of the titles of works by Edgar Allan Poe. The plots of the films themselves often had very little to do with their literary sources, but they were huge successes nonetheless and showed as often on indoor screens as they did at drive-ins. The Poe films, all shot and released in the span of four years, included The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), Tower of London (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) (with gorgeous cinematography by Nicolas Roeg) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). These films were all formally brilliant, sometimes claustrophobic, always stunning tributes to Corman's ability to wring as much atmosphere and emotion as possible out of the miniscule budget of every project. Corman also popularized the biker genre (The Wild Angels, 1966), the psychedelic drama (The Trip, 1967) and the post-Bonnie and Clyde gangster cheapie (Bloody Mama, 1970) before retiring from directing in 1971. He officially returned to the director's chair for 1990's Frankenstein Unbound, but by then his legacy of drive-in cinema, including the movies he produced under the aegis of his New World Pictures in the '70s and '80s, was already secured. Corman, often referred to as the King of the Bs, surely ranks as drive-in royalty as well.

MICHAEL and ROBERTA FINDLAY This husband-and-wife team of exploitation filmmakers are known mainly for their effectively sleazy and notorious Flesh trilogy-- The Touch of Her Flesh (1967), The Curse of Her Flesh (1968) and The Kiss of Her Flesh (1970). But even more notorious was The Slaughter, a low-budget horror cheapie shot in Argentina inspired by the Manson murders which, at the time of the film's shooting, were only about a year in the past. The Slaughter sat on the shelf for several years until it was purchased by producer Allan Shackelton, who tacked on a controversial new ending which showed one of the actresses allegedly being murdered on screen for real. The "new" movie was called Snuff and inspired a long-lasting debate over the supposed existence of actual snuff films in the pornographic underground. The Findlays have never been mistaken for artists, but their contribution to the drive-in culture of exploitation with these films is undeniable. Michael also directed the memorably trashy Yeti horror flick Shriek of the Mutilated (1974).

BERT I. GORDON Indefatigable, amiable and uninspired in equal measure, Bert I. Gordon is perhaps the quintessential giant-monster filmmaker of the drive-in era. (His initials, which allowed for the nickname Mr. BIG, suggest that he was born to this fate.) Gordon was another frequent contributor to the American International Pictures slate of drive-in classics, and though they do exist there is hardly a film in his oeuvre that does not feature an oversized creature of some sort: King Dinosaur (1955; giant dinosaurs); Beginning of the End (1957; giant grasshoppers); The Cyclops (1957; 25-foot cyclops); The Amazing Colossal Man (1957; 70-foot mutant man); War of the Colossal Beast (1958; return of the 70-foot mutant man); Earth vs. the Spider (1958; giant spider); and Village of the Giants (1965; giant teenaged punks). Giants, featuring one outlandish special effects sequence after another, is inarguably Gordon's best movie, featuring as it does Beau Bridges as one of the teenaged colossal beats, er, beasts. After a break of over 10 years from the giant creature genre, Gordon stormed back with two in-name-only H.G. Wells adaptations, The Food of the Gods (1976; giant rats, chickens and assorted other barnyard mutations) and Empire of the Ants (1977; giant ants). Scholars have yet to adequately explain the thematic aberration of Gordon's career, Attack of the Puppet People (1958), in which the main characters are shrunken to the size of dolls. The only reasonable rationale is that by going the opposite way and minimizing his leads, Gordon could then perversely lavish special-effects attention on the now-giant dogs and household insects that occasionally provide the element of menace in the film. In this regard, Gordon's reputation as the Mr. BIG of drive-in cinema remains untarnished.

H.B. HALICKI It is often said of some of the great innovators and artists and showmen of the movies that if, out of all their great contributions, they'd only just made movie "X" or movie "Y," that would have been enough to ensure their position in the pantheon. This seems certainly literally true for auto salvage magnate-turned-stuntman-filmmaker H.B. Halicki, whose sole contribution to the drive-in cinema of the '70s was his independently financed and distributed car-chase classic Gone in 60 Seconds (1974). The plot of the movie is mere window dressing for its main sequence, a wild, realistic chase around the Long Beach-South Bay area of Southern California that serves now, on top of the genuine thrills to be found in the action choreography, as a virtual time capsule of the city as it was nearly 35 years ago. The movie was successfully marketed as featuring the longest car chase ever filmed, and on that count it does not disappoint; it is action cinema purely unadorned by style, the demolition derby as primitive art. Halicki struggled to finance other pictures but produced only two other features, an action-comedy called The Junkman (1982) and Deadline Auto Theft (1983), featuring another near-hour-long car chase. Tragically, it was on the set of Gone in 60 Seconds 2 that Halicki suffered a fatal accident, crushed by a telephone pole during an elaborate stunt sequence. Gone in 60 Seconds was left in the dust by many superior car chase movies before and since which boasted good stories to go along with their great stunt work, but the exuberance and relentlessness of Halicki's masterful hour-long sequence of mayhem cannot be denied. It is rightfully recognized as a high-water mark of action choreography, the centerpiece of a movie that also pioneered a model of independent production and distribution that would soon become one of the rules of the game.

JACK HILL Drive-in stylist Jack Hill began life in the cinema doing assistant directing work (often uncredited) on Roger Corman films like The Wasp Woman and The Terror, but he soon found his own name on the director's chair. His first film and first notable success was Spider Baby (1964), an oddity about a family of misfit siblings headed by a young woman who believes she is a deadly arachnid. Though shot in 1964, Spider Baby finally saw the dim light of drive-in screens in 1968 as the anchor feature of countless drive-in double features, but was rediscovered on video in the '80s as a minor classic of psychological horror. Hill toiled in undistinguished exploitation fare, shooting American scenes for foreign shockers like Isle of the Living Dead (1971) and The Incredible Invasion (1971). But his breakthrough came again courtesy of Corman, who commissioned and distributed his drive-in prison classics The Big Doll House (1971), starring Pam Grier in one of her earliest roles, and The Big Bird Cage (1972), again starring Grier and '70s drive-in icon Sid Haig. Hill and Grier would be reunited for the director's highest profile hits, the blaxploitation classics Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), which would make Grier a star of drive-in cinema and the fantasy object of young men of a certain age, black as well as white, yellow, red and brown. Hill continued his drive-in roll with The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974), one of the earliest entries in that stalwart drive-in genre, the randy cheerleader movie, and another satiric celebration of the violent tendencies of a band of babes, this particular group known as the Switchblade Sisters (1975). It's hard to imagine that drive-ins in the 1970s would have been anything but far duller places were it not for the exuberant, slightly cracked cinema of Jack Hill.

JONATHAN KAPLAN A film student with degrees from the University of Chicago and New York University, Jonathan Kaplan has directed two actresses to award nominations-- Michelle Pfeiffer was up for a best actress Oscar for Love Field, and Bonnie Bedelia took her role as race car driver Shirley Muldowney to the Golden Globes where she was nominated for best actress in Heart Like a Wheel. But one actress on Kaplan's watch actually won a statue-- Jodie Foster claimed her first Academy Award starring in Kaplan's 1988 film The Accused. By the time of The Accused, Kaplan had established himself as a go-to director in the Hollywood establishment. But in the '70s he made a mark for himself as the director of some memorable and distinctive hits for the exploitation market. He was recruited by Roger Corman in the early '70s straight out of NYU to helm Night Call Nurses (1972), one of the earliest and zestiest romps of its sort, which led to Kaplan reteaming with Corman for another similar venture, The Student Teachers (1973), in which the stuffy world of academia gets aired out a bit by the lovely likes of Brenda Sutton, Brooke Mills and Susan Damante. Kaplan can also be seen romping with Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov et al in Hollywood Boulevard (1976), which co-director Joe Dante describes as a home movie about what it was like working at New World Pictures and making movies like Night Call Nurses and The Student Teachers. But Kaplan truly made his drive-in bones with Truck Turner (1974), a brutally energized blaxploitation thriller also starring Yaphet Kotto and Nichelle Nichols that takes full advantage of Isaac Hayes' stone-cold cool visage as an actor for the very first time, and most especially White Line Fever (1975). Fever featured Jan-Michael Vincent in a trucker's revenge plot that had the good fortune to land smack dab in the midst of the CB radio craze of the '70s, which helped propel the movie to huge box-office fortune. It was a hit indoors and outdoors, but having seen it at the drive-in, I can attest to its natural appeal as a classic for theaters built around vehicles of all kinds, a very lean and muscular example of the drive-in action template to which many aspired but so few achieved as fully as Kaplan did with this picture.

TED V. MIKELS One of the original drive-in exploitation directors, profiled in a documentary entitled The Wild World of Ted V. Mikels,, Mikels introduced elements of camp and outrageous behavior to movies that were, by the stretch of most imaginations, far less vivid and sensational than the way they were advertised. Thought of in some circles as the William Castle of drive-in and exploitation fare, Mikels rarely showed the imagination of Castle but was just as insistent a promoter of his own films. He is said to have pioneered gimmicks such as having "nurses" and "physicians" on call at the theater should anyone have heart trouble or otherwise come close to being scared to death; signing certificates acknowledging the non-responsibility of theater owners should the patron go into convulsive fits of fear; and the availability of vomit bags for the more sensitive stomachs in the theater. And Mikel's slate of drive-in fare, well familiar from its ubiquity on the movie pages of '70s newspapers, promised plenty of gore, which it sometimes delivered in such titles as The Corpse Grinders (1971; perhaps Mikels' biggest hit), Blood Orgy of the She Devils (1974) and his seminal cheapie The Astro-Zombies (1969) featuring John Carradine and Tura Satana. Mikels produced mostly horror films (and still does - he finished sequels to The Corpse Grinders and The Astro-Zombies in 2000 and 2002, respectively), though he dabbled in women's action films with some success as well; his biker babe epic Girl in Gold Boots and the straightforward actioner The Doll Squad (1973) are probably more generally well-regarded than any of his horror efforts. But it is those movies, and Mikels's own oddball personality, that accounts for his place in the drive-in directors' hall of fame

JACK STARRETT Mention Jack Starrett's name to even a die-hard drive-in or grindhouse movie fan and you're likely to get a blank stare back for your enthusiasm. His is not the most well-known name when it comes to notable directors of the period. But a glance over his credits is all it takes to realize that Jack Starrett truly deserves another look. He took part in the first surge of biker pictures, acting in such titles as Richard Rush's Hells Angels on Wheels (1967), Tom Laughlin's Born Losers (1970; the first Billy Jack movie) and Al Adamson's Hell's Bloody Devils (1970), as well as directing Run, Angel, Run (1969), starring drive-in icons William Smith and Margaret Markov, and the absurd (even for drive-in standards) The Losers (1970), in which Smith and a group of bikers infiltrate Cambodia to rescue a downed CIA operative! But Starrett came into his own with Jim Brown's initial blaxploitation effort, Slaughter (1972) and the wild, Pam Grier-influenced Cleopatra Jones (1973) in which statuesque stunner Tamara Dobson matches wits with a psychopathic Shelley Winters.

But Starrett came up with one for the ages in 1975 when he teamed Warren Oates and Peter Fonda in a mix of car chase action and satanic horror with the all-time drive-in classic Race with the Devil, a huge box-office success at the time and one of the drive-in hits to reveal itself as every bit as punchy and terrific today as it was back in 1975. Starrett also directed the well-mounted suspense piece A Small Town in Texas (1976) starring Susan George and Timothy Bottoms, and ushered out the first wave of Buford Pusser exploitation with the second sequel Final Chapter: Walking Tall (1977). Finally, Starrett was also well known as a character actor in the '70s and '80s, even after he retired from directing in the late '70s. Among his most memorable roles is his turn in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles  (1974), credited as Claude Ennis Starrett, Jr. Starett played Gabby Johnson, the hilariously incoherent parody of Gabby Hayes, whose desperate attempts to warn the citizens of Rock Ridge of the ethnicity of the new sheriff approaching on horseback is continually drowned out by the pealing of the town's welcome bell. Rrrrowrrrrght!

RAY DENNIS STECKLER Better at self-promotion than he probably ever was at directing, Ray Dennis Steckler nonetheless came up with some of the most memorable drive-in movie titles in history-- Goof on the Loose (1964), The Thrill Killers (1964), The Adventures of Rat Pfink and Boo-Boo(1965) and The Mad Love of a Hot Vampire (1971) all suggest, in varying degrees, the anti-academic sensibility at work in Steckler's pictures. But his most famous motion picture is a true wonder, a genre-busting, undeniably brilliant (on some sick level), well-paced and entertaining one-of-a-kind creation, accurately described as the first monster movie musical-- The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies (1964), starring Steckler himself (as Cash Flagg) and partially shot by soon-to-be-celebrated cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs. Zombies is one of those movies that is best left as meagerly described as possible, the better to preserve its eye-popping, ultra-cheap scenario, from which Steckler wrings genuine energy and laughs even if you're not always entirely convinced he knows how absurd it all is. In fact, Steckler's sincerity, not unlike that of Edward D. Wood, Jr., the patron saint of impoverished cinema, is what ultimately sells Zombies, a quality he would be hard-pressed to duplicate over the course of his career.

(NEXT: In the concluding installment of the SLIFR Guide to the Drive-in Movie, we run down 11 memorable appearances of drive-ins in the movies, plus a short guide to further reading about this great American movie-going institution.)

(PART 1 of this series can be accessed here.)

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