OPEN FORUM: PROJECT PROJECTIONIST

First there were the families last week who took their young ones to see the PG-rated sci-fi fantasy The Last Mimzy and, due to an error in the projection booth, were treated to the opening scene of The Hills Have Eyes 2, featuring a woman chained up and screaming for dear life as she gives birth to a mutant baby. And the release of Grindhouse has thrown even more light onto the dice-and-splice world of projectionists in sleazy grindhouse cinemas, whose battered, badly-maintained equipment routinely shredded the few prints of these films that were available and allowed those projectionists to collect frames featuring topless cheerleaders and nasty night-duty nurses from those prints— and sometimes entire sequences, thus the context for Grindhouse’s hilariously timed “REEL MISSING” cards.

I don’t think I’ve ever been witness to as ghastly a juxtaposition as that Mimzy/Eyes 2 disaster, or the kind of subliminal augmentation that so made Tyler Durden’s day in Fight Club. My stories of projector problems, growing up with my local movie house in the ‘60s and ‘70s, make up a pretty familiar laundry list—hallucinatory melting frames; the gradual fade-to-black that signaled a dying carbon-arc stick; reel changeovers accompanied by inexplicable sonic booms on the soundtrack; if it was a ‘Scope film being shown, the anamorphic lens would almost always need to be radically adjusted mid-film after every reel change; or any combination of the above at once, which usually resulted in complete shutdown of the movie, a tidal wave of flop sweat in the projection booth, and a chorus of “Put a quarter in it!” from the razor-sharp wits sitting among us in auditorium peanut gallery. And there was one instance I remember pretty vividly—a quiet pastoral scene which ended one of the reels in Disney’s original version of The Incredible Journey was interrupted rather shockingly when the changeover occurred and it was revealed that the projectionist had, instead of the next reel of the movie, accidentally loaded up the cartoon he’d showed before the feature—dogs and cats at rest together under the night sky suddenly, mercilessly gave way to a giant close-up of a grinning Donald Duck, shafts of light streaming from behind his head, and a fanfare leading into Donald’s theme song. The lights went dark, the quiet mood of the movie ruined, a few of the older patrons picked themselves up off the floor, and the rest of us did our part to uphold a tradition that I’m sure still continues in my hometown, where a hilarious comment only gains in hilarity if it can be passed down to a new generation of impatient morons—of course, we all began chanting “Put a quarter in it! Put a quarter in it!”

J.R. Jones, film critic for the Chicago Reader, has taken some madcap inspiration from the Mimzy incident, as well as his own memories of projecting films in the ‘70s, and come up with a hilarious proposition in his brief piece entitled “We Apologize For The Inconvenience.” And don’t stop at the end of the piece— there are a lot of anecdotal contributions in the comments section from other projectionists and “victimized” moviegoers too. So enjoy J.R. Jones recipe for stirring up audiences in the multiplex and the art house, and then, if you’re an ex- or current projectionist or an audience member who can bear witness and would like to share any good anecdotes of spectacular projection snafus, please do. It’s Open Forum Day at SLIFR, so please feel free to post comments on anything you're interested in talking about. But the question of the day is: What’s your best story of when things went terribly wrong with the projector, or anything else, at the movies?

MOVIES OF THE MOMENT: GRINDHOUSE

So it turns out that all the marketing in the world can’t make up for the fact that Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and, most importantly, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, sincerely overestimated just how many people were going to want to see Grindhouse, their lovingly detailed replication of a ‘70s B-movie double feature.

Whatever. In the aftermath of Pulp Fiction, similar miscalculations have been made for just about everything released by these directors, with the exception of Sin City which, if memory serves, rang up plenty big box-office cash. No matter how lovingly or relentlessly sold, there just aren’t enough folks in my demographic (just north of 45) who cherish, or are willing to own up to cherishing, B-movies like Switchblade Sisters, Zombie, Coffy, The Swingin’ Cheerleaders or Trip with the Teacher to make Grindhouse a big Wild Hogs-sized hit. And there’s a scene in Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of this very special night out at the movies, that provides a razor-sharp critical analysis of the problem at the heart of pitching Grindhouse to the all-important 18-to-25-year-olds that pump the lifeblood through what’s left of Hollywood. A character who goes by the name of Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) sits at a bar regaling a group of indulgent young cuties with tales of his past work, throwing out names like “Bob Urich” and Vega$ and, gulp, The Virginian. The young women nod vacantly, but appreciatively, as Mike continues to spin his tales, until he stops for a moment and then asks, “Do you even recognize the names of these shows?” The women, caught, have to admit that they don’t, and Mike is consigned, by all but an unfortunate one of them, to the special zone of irrelevancy occupied by the arcane pop culture of an older generation. In this moment, it’s hard not to see Tarantino himself, as Stephanie Zacharek observed in her review of Grindhouse, as a similar kind of generational proselytizer—Stuntman Quentin—carrying a vast wealth of knowledge of movie history around in that gigantic cranium, preaching the gospel of cinematic and pop culture minutiae and obscure talents to a younger generation that may not so readily relate to his historically minded artist/entertainer’s perspective.


But putting aside Harvey Weinstein’s panicked teeth-gnashing about Grindhouse’s opening weekend box-office and performance, and his utterly illogical notion to split the movies up in a couple of weeks and re-release them with added footage—essentially spending countless more millions to try to resell what he’s already perceived the general moviegoing public either doesn’t understand or even necessarily want— we still have the movie itself (for however much longer Weinstein allows) to consider. The three-hour and 15-minute Grindhouse that is still in theaters, consisting of Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, and the surrounding fake trailers and bounty of hilarious details—missing reel cards, scratched reels, bad splices, muddy sound, bleached and tinted patches, et al-- is clearly not for everybody—I don’t even get paid to make savvy marketing guesses, and I could have told Harvey that them what likes Norbit and Wild Hogs and Blades of Glory may not flock to his movie (especially on Easter weekend). But for heathens and film-savvy fans eager to revisit the heyday of pus-and-blood zombie epics, road-rage-fueled revenge thrillers and directors like Jack Hill, Lucio Fulci and George A. Romero, when downtown urban grindhouses and, perhaps even more importantly for my generation (and Tarantino’s), drive-ins served as musty, rickety, sticky cathedrals for exhibiting the violent, sleazy, amoral dregs of movie culture, Grindhouse is a 195-minute bliss-out, a giddy orgy of nostalgia, reinvention and, maybe for some, redemption of a kind of movie most often held beneath contempt by critics and even moviegoers.


After a spectacularly funny phony trailer for a macho vigilante thriller called Machete, directed by Rodriguez and starring the near-iconic badass Danny Trejo (“These guys were fucking with the wrong Mexican!”), the double feature starts in earnest with Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, which, for all the exacting effort put into making the print look like it’s been run through the gears of a series of badly maintained projectors, is pretty much B-movie nostalgia served straight up. It’s a borderline incoherent zombie narrative with a whiff of parody, but never the deadly ironist’s wink, which hangs together just long enough to showcase the latest in zombie gore and lusciously ambivalent sexual iconography, courtesy of Rose MacGowan’s ambitious stripper (she wants to be a stand-up comedian) whose leg is eaten, and then replaced with a machine gun/grenade launcher by her gunslinger boyfriend (Freddy Rodriguez).


Planet Terror gathers together a group of societal castoffs and ne’er-do-wells in the battle against a government-created zombie crisis—Howard Hawks by way of John Carpenter—but Rodriguez isn’t so much interested in examining or expanding the form of this kind of cheapie thriller as he is mounting the most spectacular version of it possible. Of course, all the effects are far more sophisticated than those on display in Fulci’s The Beyond or Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and Rodriguez’s movie lurches far more rapidly and spastically toward ever-escalating and ever-gorier set pieces than the real thing did—back in the mid ‘70s, the patches in-between eyeball-gougings and decapitations were frequently marred by dull stretches of character drama or other manifestations of listless pacing and bad direction. Rodriguez, ironically, is served well by the pastiche form of Planet Terror, in which coherence is not a high priority, because coherence isn’t exactly one of his strengths either. He’s a sensationalist as a director-- most of his stylistic effects exist in a vacuum created by a relentless pursuit of cool, and this pursuit almost always results in bad movies (Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Spy Kids 3-D, From Dusk Till Dawn). You get the sense that Rodriguez makes movies primarily so he can sit around on the set with his legs kicked up, strumming a guitar and hiding underneath a cowboy hat between takes, conjuring an image of cool and movies of insistently facile and hollow imagery.


But here Rodriguez seems, for once, to be having fun as a director, staging large-scaled scenes of fleshy destruction—the bodies don’t splatter as much as explode, like balloon people filled with plasma and gristle—and setting up razor-thin parallels to the kind of social commentary that would often provide B-movies of this ilk with some much appreciated (if often ill-advised) political context, or subtext. (Planet Terror could be subtitled Apocalypse Wow!) And whenever the action kicks into gear, Rodriguez responds by striking a stylistic coup by using the textural pleasures of those ragged grindhouse prints as devices to amplify the action on top of the already whirligig editing and sound—the scratches and pops and jittery frames get even scratchier and poppier and jitterier when MacGowan tilts her lovely frame, lifts what used to be her leg and mows down another in an endless line of shuffling undead meat-sacks with another spray of machine gun fire.

Once Planet Terror reaches its conclusion, it’s time for the entertainment before the second feature, which consists of perfectly pitched genre trailers by currently hot genre directors. Rob Zombie’s delirious Werewolf Women of the S.S. climaxes with a suitably bizarre celebrity cameo and is so goddamn weird in itself that I’m sure I must have dreamt it. Fans of the British horror offerings from companies like Amicus will appreciate Edgar Wright’s witty and precise evocation of these relatively sophisticated pictures, though respect for a great joke prevents me from revealing the title of this particular fake thriller. And Eli Roth’s entry in the holiday-themed slasher genre preview, Thanksgiving (“This year there’s no more leftovers!”), may be the best thing he’s ever done, right down to the ghastly surprise awaiting a vivacious cheerleader on a trampoline. (One bonus granted to us at the drive-in where I saw Grindhouse Saturday night—a real 15-minute intermission was inserted after Planet Terror, but before the onslaught of trailers, to accommodate the limits of the reels in the projection booth, which can only hold movies that max out at two hours and 45 minutes, as well as the limits of one's bladder.)


The double feature takes on a completely different tone, however, with Tarantino’s Death Proof. A person whose name I can’t remember to credit commented last week that Rodriguez directs Planet Terror like someone who’s heard all about grindhouse movies, but Tarantino directs Death Proof like a fan who’s really processed them, like someone to whom they actually have meaning and resonance, someone who has a discernable approach that exists outside the original texts but has nevertheless been grounded in them. I think some of the resistance to and/or disappointment in Death Proof can be traced to the way it has been marketed—as a relentless chrome-and-burning-rubber thriller. It’s a bait and switch familiar to Tarantino and any B-movie fan-- in the world of low-budget exploitation filmmaking the posters were often way more satisfying than the movies themselves, trafficking in a spectacular clashing of potent graphic design and hyperbolic ad copy that routinely outstripped the energy and style (or lack thereof) flickering away on screen.

Death Proof promises gruesome, high-octane action, and unlike many of the B-movies of yore (Death Race 2000 being a notable exception) it delivers on its promise. Where the bait and switch comes in is that Tarantino, in Grindhouse’s most radical act of reinvention, mixes the creeping dread of a sinister car thriller with exacting visual and aural recreations of the cheerleader and female-revenge pictures (both Jack Hill specialties) and his own unceasing desire to hang out and listen to the characters he must eventually put in harm’s way, which is here recast in the textural sensitivity and patience of Monte Hellman’s brilliant road movie Two-Lane Blacktop. (And here I must take time out to route you to D.K. Holm’s excellent review of Grindhouse, the only other piece of writing I’ve read that makes note of what is, for me, this crucial connection to Hellman’s film.)


David Edelstein writes of Death Proof: “What makes some critics' knee-jerk derision of Tarantino so vexing is that he's more than a violence peddler. He's a predatory humanist. He loves just to hang out with his soon-to-be beleaguered characters… (He’s) a movie freak who loves women onscreen almost as much as he loves to punish women onscreen, and who (this is what makes him an artist) gets off most on his own ambivalence.” This ambivalence powers the first 20 minutes of the movie, in which we’re introduced to the Austin city lights courtesy of a carload of profane hotties in short-shorts—a local radio personality (Sydney Tamilia Poitier) and her smokin’, drinkin’, sexed-up friends (Jordan Ladd and Vanessa Ferlito). Tarantino draws out this loose-limbed night out to near its numbed vanishing point, daring impatient audiences to get fed up with this brooding, bitching posse as they spin their wheels and knock back shots in a dingy hot spot. They eventually catch the eye of Stuntman Mike (Russell), a man who seems to have been haunting one of them—Ferlito’s Arlene spots his muscled-up Chevy Nova, complete with skull and crossbones and a Rubber Duck ornament on the hood, parked ominously outside the bar, and the movie’s inexplicable sense of dread begins to mount. Tarantino likes these largely obnoxious women and doesn’t want to let them out of the cocoon of protective inebriation he’s spun for them (he even plays the dive’s bartender-in-residence), even though he knows he must. And up to now the movie has much of the same cool openness to the rhythm of experience as it comes that was a hallmark of Two-Lane Blacktop, and an ability to see how moving on the road, while here not so much open as haunted, informs the arrogance and entitlement these girls radiate. (To those that don’t respond to the rhythms of Death Proof, however, this openness comes off like aimless indulgence and lack of direction.)


Reservoir Dames?

But Stuntman Mike is soon revealed to have far more sinister plans than his jokey barroom John Wayne impersonations, anecdotes of “old” Hollywood, and his honest self-assessments (“Honey, I ain’t stalkin’ you, but that don’t mean I’m not a wolf”) would indicate. And Death Proof, already the second half of a bifurcated B-movie revelry, takes a tonal right turn worthy of Psycho, after a brilliant and terrifying head-on collision that pays tribute to each victim in awful acknowledgment of the violability of their bodies, into the territory where cheerleaders swing, sisters unite in righteous fury and muscle cars thunder along hot pavement on which the likes of Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry are significant name-checks. Tarantino serves up four more hot chicks—an actress decked out in a cheerleader uniform (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a make-up artist (RosarioDawson) and two stuntwomen (Zoe Bell and Tracie Thoms)—all on time-out from a movie shoot who kill more time with more patented Tarantino talk, some of it teetering on self-parody, and all of it much sweeter and more entertaining than the banter of the doomed trio of the first half. As D.K. Holm observes, we don’t want to see these women die.


But we know who they will eventually meet, and faster than you can say Samuel Z. Arkoff it happens, while the two stuntwomen test-drive a 1970 Dodge Challenger just like the one in Vanishing Point, with Bell hanging onto the hood by two belt straps. The car chase Tarantino serves up here more than fulfills the harrowing promise of the advertising—the old-school, no-CGI aesthetic of visceral car-chase action is put to the best expression since Ronin, and leads to the movie’s mind-boggling, pulse-pounding switcheroo, a situation that allows Russell to explode out of the scarred, hot-leather mythos he’s constructed for Mike into giddy new territory. (Russell, by the way, is his usual superb self here, and a bit of a brave surprise as well.)

It takes a while to process than there’s a whole lot less futzing around with the scratched-burnt-torn film aesthetic in Death Proof, and the moment you notice it (it’ll come for everyone in a different point in the movie, most probably) is the moment you’ll realize you’ve been sucked in by Death Proof as a movie, not just as an elaborate stunt. It is, I think, one of Tarantino’s best films in that he has found a way to fuse the aesthetic of different of drive-in movie archetypes and apply his relentless cinephilia to a movie that is certainly an homage, but more importantly one that expresses the brutal feeling of a born storyteller for his characters. The movie beautifully apes the stoned, fuzzy aesthetic and flat compositions of a typical Crown International Pictures release (Tarantino was his own director of photography) while offering up something resembling people we’re granted the time to get to know—and some of them are unpleasant as hell—as grist for the grindhouse mill, and it ends up winding a loping, natural path back to the ambivalence of Tarantino’s most emotionally resonant film, Jackie Brown (itself in part a B-movie homage starring Foxy Brown herself, Pam Grier), and a suitably wild, abrupt conclusion.

For some, Grindhouse will be a long sit, and they may welcome the cutting asunder that the Weinsteins allegedly have planned. But I found the movie intoxicating from first jittery frame to last. It’s so packed with authentic film geek love that I felt transported in a way that honors Grindhouse’s intentions and achievements in the presence of the real deal, which is still unspooling nightly at the New Beverly’s L.A. Grindhouse Festival 2007 through the end of May. That response may have had something to do with seeing it at a drive-in too (I’m seeing it again at the Rialto in Pasadena this weekend, so we’ll see), but I think it has more to do with Stuntman Quentin and Sidekick Robert’s desire to connect with the meaning (or lack thereof) found in the discarded refuse of our collective movie past. If you’re of a like mind, as I always knew I was, Grindhouse is a singular event, a pustulant, smokin’ rubber-scented gift for true believers. I’ll give the last word to David Edelstein whose review, along with D.K. Holm’s, expressed my feelings about this movie (these movies) better than I think I have myself:

“There's another reason that Grindhouse is, for some of us misfits, such a happy trip. It affirms our sense of community. No one at the time wrote much about grindhouse fare. It was mostly too sexist and lowbrow for the Voice, and way too lowbrow for the Times. (In her review of Dawn of the Dead, the sequel to the sixties' most seminal horror film, Janet Maslin boasted about walking out in the first fifteen minutes.) It's true that most of these films were depressingly bad. But there was something vital, something electric about the liveness of that culture. I'm sad that most people will see Grindhouse on video. It should be consumed (or, depending on your perspective, endured) in a theater full of shrieking, gasping, cheering, borderline-ashamed exploitation junkies. Nowadays, people smoke dope and drink and jerk off in front of TV screens in the privacy of their homes. They really need to get out more.”

Amen. If you haven’t yet seen Grindhouse, or even if you have, get yourself to a theater (or a drive-in) and see it before Harvey gets his grubby sausage fingers on it and guts it of its purpose and context in the name of the almighty dollar. Sure, exploitation producer Joseph Brenner was known for doing this same kind of crap back in the day. But that’s one grindhouse tradition not worth keeping alive. I hope Tarantino and Rodriguez can somehow get the Weinsteins to see the light, as projected out from one of the clanking, film-shredding beasts of exhibition that gave the grindhouses, and Grindhouse, its name.

***********************************************************************

Links to further reviews of Grindhouse, from B to Z, some positive, some not so positive, all worth a look:

Andrew Bemis

Tom Charity

David Denby

David Edelstein

Owen Gleiberman

D.K. Holm

Jeremiah Kipp

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Nick Schager

A.O. Scott

Armond White

Stephanie Zacharek

BOB CLARK 1941 - 2007

Film director Bob Clark, by most accounts one of the more personable, unpretentious and likable men in the movie business, died early Wednesday, along with his 22-year-old son Ariel Hanrath-Clark, victims of an unlicensed driver speeding down Pacific Coast Highway in the wrong lane under the influence of alcohol. Of course, it shouldn’t matter a bit, Bob Clark’s reputation as a gentleman—even the death of the most spurious Hollywood asshole under such circumstances would be a tragedy. But in this case, death came far too early to a well-loved man whose professional life seemed to be on an upswing (he was busy finalizing plans to remake his biggest hit, Porky’s, with Howard Stern) and who was finally beginning to enjoy a measure of respect from critics and other filmmakers for a career in lowbrow comedies and horror films that, for all the financial success of the Porky’s films (he helmed the first two), spawned two genuine classics, one horror film, one comedy, and both tied to the celebration of the Christmas season.


He adapted Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash into A Christmas Story (1983), wisely hiring Shepherd himself to read the droll narration, and in the process creating a movie that did modest business theatrically, but which became a perennial favorite through repeated viewings in the early days of home video. It’s an inspired, pitch-perfect evocation of a postwar Rockwellian past spun with just enough saltiness to make for several hilarious and memorable set pieces. Hearing Darren McGavin, as Shepherd’s harried and harassed father, spewing untranslated mock curses was worth the price of admission alone.


Left to right, R.D. Robb (Schwartz), Ian Petrella (Randy Parker), Peter Billingsley (Ralphie), Scott Schwartz (Flick) and Zack Ward (Scut Farkus) flank Bob Clark at a recent appearance at the Arclight Cinemas to promote the 20th anniversary of the release of A Christmas Story.

And in 1974, after making low-budget shockers like Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and Dead of Night, he unleashed Silent Night, Deadly Night in Canada in 1974. The film, which played in the USA under the title Black Christmas, was a favorite of mine, and after having not seen for nearly 20 years, I revisited it recently, convinced that my memory of it being an effective but routine thriller would far exceed the reality of seeing it as a jaded adult horror fan. I wrote of Black Christmas last October:

“Like A Bay of Blood was to Friday the 13th, Bob Clark’s holiday-themed slasher film was an admitted influence on John Carpenter, and it predates Halloween by three years. But many of the genre’s familiar visual motifs are present here, including long periods of foreboding silence and an early stab at Steadicam-type camera movement to suggest the killer’s point of view. (In an interview, Clark admitted that the movements were done sans Steadicam, with a camera mounted on the operator’s head.) Black Christmas, a slasher thriller taking the form of a whodunit set on a small college campus, features a pretty good cast, including Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, John Saxon and Margot Kidder, who steals the movie outright as one of Hussey’s foul-mouthed sorority sisters who engages the killer in a memorable trash-talking phone call. (It was Kidder, in this film, who introduced me, at age 15, to the word “fellatio.”) Clark does a fine job teasing the audience with the various possibilities as to the killer’s identity. But where Halloween offers a creditable back story for the knife-wielding Michael Meyers, Clark and company offer no such comfort, either at the beginning or the end of the film, leaving the audience chilled in a way that goes far beyond the movie’s wintry setting. And Black Christmas registers at least one grisly image into the horror hall of fame—that screaming woman in the rocking chair, her gasping visage wrapped in plastic, a human Christmas present from the movie’s relentless psycho to the rest of the terrorized sorority sisters and, of course, to us.”

The big surprise in viewing Black Christmas was not that it matched my memory, but actually exceeded it. Kim Morgan, in her tribute to Clark today, called Black Christmas a masterpiece, and though I wouldn’t have said so a year ago, I’m pretty close to agreement with that statement after seeing it again last year. Its influence on the trajectory of the modern horror film, I think, can’t and shouldn’t be understated. And for those who never met him (I’m one) who are interested in a look at what Bob Clark was like with an appreciative audience, the special edition Black Christmas DVD features footage of Clark in a Q-and-A at the New Beverly here in Los Angeles on a recent screening of his horror classic. Bob Clark made a lot of forgettable films, it’s true, as well as a couple of lesser-known pictures that are far better than their reputation or obscurity would suggest—the savagely-reviewed lawyer comedy From the Hip (1987) starring Judd Nelson, and the relatively lavish Sherlock Holmes-Jack the Ripper thriller Murder by Decree (1979), which featured the best cast—Christopher Plummer, James Mason, Donald Sutherland, John Gielgud, just for starters— with which Clark would ever work. But for any one director to have his name on not one, but two acknowledged genre classics is no small achievement, and there is no doubt that A Christmas Story and Black Christmas will continue to be remembered long after Porky’s, Rhinestone and Baby Geniuses have been forgotten. The saddest commentary on Clark’s life and career is that they could be so mindlessly, instantly snatched away in a horrific set of circumstances that remain far too common on every street and highway in our country and around the world.

THE SLIFR WEEKEND READING/VIEWING LIST: GRINDHOUSE AT THE DRIVE-IN, MARIO BAVA, WERNER HERZOG and ALL YOUR FAVE TEEN STARS!

Not much time to cobble a post together right now, but since I’m between classes this week I’ve got a little more opportunity than usual to get some stuff up and running. As usual, there’s a plethora of great items to read concerning any and all film-related subjects, most of it rounded up on the supreme gathering site for all of us interested in film, GreenCine Daily, which is, after all, where I heard about most of the stuff I’m highlighting tonight. David Hudson, Craig Phillips and company continue to astound, day in and day out, with the wealth of links and commentary available on this magnificent site. When people talk about the ways film criticism and film writing is changing because of the Internet, I have to believe that those changes would not be so noticeable or important, or even possible, without the core of information distribution that is GreenCine Daily. I can’t remember what my cloistered was like before I got hooked on this site, and that’s a big 10-4 and an “Amen!” for lost memories.

I’m planning a big drive-in get-together this weekend in conjunction with the Southern California Drive-in Movie Society-- yes, we’re all putting a convoy together to go see Meet the Robinsons… pause… pause… No, that was last weekend. This weekend we’re headed out to the famous Mission Tiki Drive-in to open up the drive-in season with—what else?-- Grindhouse. What a great opportunity it’s going to be to see this movie, of all movies, on a drive-in screen where it belongs. And I extend an invitation to everyone reading this in the area who would like to come out and join us, say hi, and enjoy a trip down ‘70s exploitation memory lane with Tarantino and Rodriguez and the rest of this explosive romper room set. Just look for the big SoCalDIMS banner in the middle of whatever lot Grindhouse will be playing— I’m expecting at least 50 of my sex-and-violence-loving friends for a tailgate party that’ll be in full swing for about two hours before the movie starts. And then the fun will really begin when the Technalight projector fires up around 7:45 and Planet Terror gets underway. This is the movie event of the season, at least for movie-event-starved types like myself, who don’t get out to many film festivals or press screenings or the like, and I sincerely hope if you’re anywhere near Los Angeles this weekend that you’ll join us!

With Grindhouse in mind, here’s a few ways you can get yourself primed for the big show Internet style. The reviews are starting to come in from the writers who you actually care to pay attention to, and they’re pretty good and pretty thoughtful. Scott Foundas of the L.A. Weekly checks in with an early report in the Minneapolis-St. Paul City Pages:

“There exists some debate about audience familiarity with the term "grindhouse," and even a certain confusion about the origins of the word itself—whether it refers to the movies that composed a gilded age of exploitation cinema or to the all-night urban theaters in which they were regularly shown. It matters little, though, for so richly evocative is Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse of an earlier generation's guilty cinematic pleasures that you can practically feel the stick of dried soda under your sneakers and smell the faint aroma of bum emanating from the row behind you.”

Being that the City Pages rolls with the New Times syndicate, the paper has taken the opportunity to post Nathan Lee’s write-up right alongside Foundas’s:

“Tarantino is a big supporter of the neo-exploitation crowd (two of whose luminaries, Eli Roth and Rob Zombie, contribute ingenious trailers for imaginary films alongside Edgar Wright and Rodriguez), but his own sensibility is sweeter. Death Proof expends most of its energy on boozy barroom camaraderie and baroque restaurant chitchat. Even the villain is rather a dear, while Tarantino clearly relishes his rehabilitation of Russell, on whom he lavishes as much affection as his girls gone wild. And wild they go, pedal to the metal, brandishing iron poles, turning the tables on Stuntman Mike in a giddy automotive assault that climaxes with the finest syncopation since Before Sunset…From first frame to last—and by the time you exit this blockbuster-as-block party behemoth, you'll have taken in a quarter-million of them. This monumentally pointless movie is best summarized by a line from Planet Terror: "At some point in your life, you find a use for every useless talent you have." Rodriguez, Tarantino & Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about goddamn time.”

(Lee’s review is also available in the online edition of the Village Voice.)

Glenn Kenny offers this excellent observation from Premiere Online:

"Death Proof offers 'thrills' that are deeply unpleasant and deeply unwholesome, and it's here that Grindhouse comes closest to achieving the 'climate of perdition' that another surrealist critic, Robert Benayoun termed the hallmark of 'authentic sadistic cinema.' A lot of people associate a taste for grindhouse movies with the tiresome condescension of the 'so-bad-it's-good' ethos, but Tarantino understands the aesthetics of aberrance that animated the explorations of so-called trash hounds."

Foundas also checks in among the virtual pages of the L.A. Weekly with a report on an official summit meeting of grindhouse directors. Conveyed by Tarantino himself, it's a lively round-table featuring Richard Rush (The Stunt Man, Hells Angels on Wheels), Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead-End Drive-In, BMX Bandits), Allan Arkush (Rock and Roll High School, Get Crazy), George Armitage (Miami Blues, Private Duty Nurses), Lewis Teague (Alligator, The Lad in Red) and the late Bob Clark (Black Christmas, Porky's), who died mere days after the summit took place.

And in the spirit of the weekend, D.K. Holm offers a great piece at the increasingly indispensable Screengrab entitled ”The Music of Death Proof: A Beginner’s Guide.”

But no one, and I mean no one, is as excited to see Grindhouse on the big screen as that number-one fan of on-screen decapitation, Kim Morgan. From the pages of her MSN Movies Filter blog comes this first-rate interview with Kurt Russell, aka Snake Plissken, aka Stuntman Mike. Then there’s Kim’s smackdown with Time Out writer David Fear over the merits (or lack thereof) of Tarantino, the director. (And actually, if you access the smackdown via Kim’s Sunset Gun blog, you’ll be spared the smirking shot of Tarantino in favor of some much more photogenic shots from the movie.) Finally, Kim rallies for 10 Great Car Movies in anticipation of the reportedly spectacular stunt work in Death Proof. I loved recounting all of the terrific movies Kim mentions here, particularly her number-one pick, but in a rare moment of ‘70s heresy, I have to admit that that last time I saw Vanishing Point (about three years ago) I was considerably underwhelmed. Some of the movie's car stuff is undeniably great, but it doesn’t wear its existential malaise nearly as well as that number-one pick. (No, I’m not telling you what it is. Go find out yourself!) Anyway, I would have replaced Vanishing Point with the less-muscle-car oriented The Italian Job (the original 1969 British version) or John Frankheimer’s full-throttle Ronin. But I’m nitpicking. Go find out what Kim picked as number-one, rent it and watch it before you see Grindhouse.

Final item on the Grindhouse beat: Screengrab's weekly Top Ten list focuses this week on Girls with Guns! See Sigourney Weaver, Anne Parillaud and, let's see... at least eight more ballistic beauties strap 'em on in honor of the opening of Grindhouse. Check out Part One and Part Two of this fun list courtesy of the Screengrab gang. (Thanks for the tip, Bilge.)


Before I go, just to prove that I am thinking about other things than this upcoming B-movie delight, how about another couple of confrontational video clips, both of them as fascinating, if not as repellent, as the David O. Russell/Lily Tomlin shenanigans. Via Anne Thompson and her new digs at Thompson on Hollywood comes a provocative bit of reverse psychology courtesy of actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who turns a video camera on a couple of paparazzi for a short film he calls Pictures of Assholes.

And then there’s this priceless footage of brilliant artists/macho fatheads Norman Mailer and Rip Torn literally
ripping and tearing at each other on the set of Mailer’s film Maidhouse, way back in 1971, the dawning of those heady days of the Golden Age of Great American Films, a banner under which Maidhouse is typically not placed.

Finally, two more places to go for good reading: In anticipation of the spectacular new Mario Bava box set, check out Sean Axmaker’s nuanced appreciation of the director at GreenCine. A sample:

“Legend has it that Italian genre veteran Riccardo Freda "pushed" his friend Bava into the director's chair by abandoning not one but two projects for his frequent cinematographer to finish (it's hard to verify the real reason that Freda left the projects, but it makes a good story to justify printing the legend)… Bava was offered a shot a directing a project of his choosing. He chose Nikolai Gogol's short story "Viy" and made his official directorial debut, at age 46, on The Mask of Satan, renamed Black Sunday for the US release.

...From the opening frames, Bava proved that he knew how grab an audience's attention. Barbara Steele, her eyes glaring hate even as her face registers terror, is bound to a stake, spitting curses with hellfire to the robed and masked judges who pronounce her death sentence. A spiked mask is slowly placed over her face and a massive wooden mallet pounds the iron mask with a startling finality as the credits explode in fire (this final shot was excised from the American release). Even as the film eases into an eerie gothic atmosphere of a ghost story, where centuries later the corpse is revived by the innocent descendant (also played by Steele) with a single drop of blood, Bava never eases up on the tension. His vivid style - gliding camerawork, dramatic lighting, striking compositions and atmospheric sets cobbled together from limited resources - set the standard for Italian gothic horror, and his magnificent photography of the weirdly beautiful Steele made her an icon of the genre. Equally good as the devilishly wicked witch, with eyes blazing and evil smile set off by feral teeth, and the haunted innocent, she plays both in this moody, macabre cult classic of cruelty.”

And speaking of Bava, congratulations to Tim Lucas on the completion of what promises to be a great resource on the films of Mario Bava, his new book entitled All the Colors of the Dark. Click on Tim’s name to get a closer look at the sweat and tears, and of course the blood, that went into the writing and finishing of the book.



Paul Clark, frequent SLIFR visitor and proprietor of his own keen blog entitled Silly Hats Only (which always has something cool going on in it), has joined the stable of paid contributors to Bilge Ebiri’s aforementioned Screengrab with a doozy of a piece on Peter Watkins’ first film, a rock and roll tale entitled Privilege, shot by British cinematographer extraordinaire Peter Suschitzky:

“The cinematic influence of Privilege can be felt in a number of subsequent films. Many of the rock movies of the next few decades owe a debt to Privilege, from the bombast of Tommy to the stylishness of Phantom of the Paradise. The rally scenes in Pink Floyd: The Wall are clearly Watkins-inspired. Watkins himself has claimed that no less a filmmaker than Stanley Kubrick cribbed a scene from Privilege for A Clockwork Orange, though it’s hard to tell which one. Likewise, some of the music from the film has been covered or appropriated by a number of artists, from Patti Smith to Big Audio Dynamite.

But even more startling than the film’s direct influences is the story’s almost prophetic nature. It’s hard not to see Steven Shorter in the reluctant, self-destructive pop stars of today, Britney Spears being the obvious example. The efforts by Shorter’s handlers to re-fashion their client’s image clearly anticipates shape-shifters like Madonna. But strangely enough, the person I thought of most while watching Privilege isn’t a musician at all, but Oprah Winfrey — another pop-culture titan whose image is used not only to sell consumer products and spirituality but a whole lifestyle. That Oprah presumably does this of her own free will, rather than being led into it as Shorter is, merely feels like the logical progression of events.”

Congratulations, Paul, on a vivid piece of writing and for your newfound association with Screengrab!

Finally, David Hudson once again points the way to what he terms a Werner Herzog dossier, hours of reading and viewing on the great German director compiled by film journalist Ray Pride. The dossier includes rather amazing footage of Herzog being interviewed in Los Angeles by British journalist Mark Kermode and being shot on camera by an unseen sniper. The bullet turns out to be from an air rifle, but the wounding is no less shocking for that, nor is Herzog’s reserve under fire any less revealing. Says Herzog (after showing Kermode the oozing extent of his wound), “Bottom line, I think the poet must not avert his eyes. You have to take a bold look at what is your environment, what is around you…” The whole dossier is loaded with fascinating links and video clips. Thanks, Ray, for compiling what, for any fan or respecter of Herzog’s work, will be a must-read/see experience.

That’s it for now. I’ll check in over the weekend with my answers to Professor Irwin Corey’s quiz, a report from the Grindhouse Drive-In party, plus more on the opening of drive-in season and anything else that comes across the radar. I hope to see you at the drive-in this weekend, or right here all week long.

WHO'S PATSY KELLY?

I innocently logged onto Netflix a few days ago, and I was greeted by a “Movie Note” from a Netflix Friend of mine who had evidently been paying far-too-close attention to my queue and my general tastes. Next to a picture of the cover art for a little-known screwball comedy from 1943 entitled My Son, the Hero was my Friend’s question/comment, jumping off the screen in a large, purple, impossible-to-miss font:

“What prompted this? Doesn't fit your normal Netflix rental pattern at all."I stared at the question/comment for a few seconds, and then my own question/comments started to percolatin’: “What is he saying, my fanatical Friend? That I don’t rent enough obscure comedies from the ‘40s? Did he know about the movie and decide that, amongst all of the late-period screwball comedies I could have chosen, this one was so far afield in quality from the others that it merited worried attention? Just how closely is my Friend paying heed to what I’m having sent home to me? (Not that I’m paranoid or anything, but…) Will he feel compelled to chime in again when the reputedly rotten The Life of David Gale (currently #32 with a bullet) finds its way to the surface of my ridiculously long queue? (I probably would.) And why would anyone’s rental patterns but your own (and perhaps even your own) be so fascinating as to merit a question/comment sent down the Netflix pipeline?

I hastily fired back an e-mail, explaining that though I didn’t realize it at the time, the movie was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, a fact that I thought would satisfy my cinephiliac pal. But then I added the real reason-- “Besides, I’ve got a bit of a Patsy Kelly fixation these days”—and left it at that.

Imagine my surprise when my friend, whose knowledge of cinema, particularly Hollywood genre films, handily surpasses my own in a most complete and embarrassing fashion, shot back a curt reply:

“Who’s Patsy Kelly?”

I realized that if my film-soaked Friend didn’t know who Patsy Kelly was, then it was safe to assume that most casual and even passionately devoted movie buffs, not to mention the audience at large that creates $100 million hits out of movies like Wild Hogs and Norbit, wouldn’t know Patsy Kelly from Marjorie Main or Shirley Booth. (And they probably wouldn’t know who the other two were either.) One of the most popular comediennes in American movies in the 1930s and 1940s, Patsy Kelly, her early movies of this period largely unavailable on DVD, now seemed to be vaulted away in musty obscurity with the rest of the stars of a long-forgotten Hollywood.

Patsy was born Bridget Sarah Veronica Rose Kelly in Brooklyn, New York in 1910 and was given the nickname that would stick with her throughout her career by her brother. The actress was discovered by vaudeville star Frank Fay and by 1927 was on Broadway in Harry Delmar's Revels. She also starred on the Great White Way in shows like Three Cheers, Wonder Bar and two for producer Earl Carroll-- Sketch Book (1929) and Vanities (1930).

But after Wonder Bar in 1931, Hollywood, in the personage of producer Hal Roach, came calling, and he signed Kelly to a series of featherweight two-reel comedies co-starring Thelma Todd. Kelly, from the start never one to keep her mind to herself, is quoted as saying about her journey to the movie capital, “"I'll be a flop in movies. Besides, I don't like 'em, and I never did believe there was a place called Hollywood. Somebody made it up!" But it turned out to be very real indeed, and the Roach comedies ended up having a very popular run. The encyclopedic John McElwee has lots of good information about the Roach/Todd/Kelly/Pitts shorts in this detailed post on Todd at his blog Greenbriar Picture Shows. However, his comments re Kelly, who replaced Zasu Pitts in the shorts after money issues made it impossible for her to continue, are restricted to one sentence with which I must good-naturedly take issue: “Zazu’s easier to take than Patsy. Even a subdued Patsy (and Patsy was never subdued) is akin to root canal without benefit of anesthesia.” The series ended after 21 films when Todd died in 1935.

Two years earlier, Kelly broke into features as Marion Davies' wisecracking sidekick in Raoul Walsh’s Going Hollywood, and over the course of the next 10 years she made nearly 40 more films, including The Girl from Missouri (1934), Page Miss Glory (1935), Pigskin Parade (1936), The Cowboy and the Lady (1938), The Gorilla (1939), Topper Returns (1940), In Old California, My Son, the Hero and Danger! Women at Work (1943). (You can catch one of her best-- Ever Since Eve (1937), again with Marion Davies-- this coming Monday, April 9, at 8:30 a.m. PST.)

Cresting on a wave of popularity, the once–in-demand actress found herself nearly unemployable by the mid-1940s and ended up taking work as a domestic. Theories to explain why Hollywood was no longer interested in one of its most bankable comic actresses inevitably turn toward Kelly’s hard drinking. But others have claimed that it was her openness about her homosexuality that was most off-putting in a Hollywood that was still a good 45 years from setting a collective toe out of the closet. (She admitted to author Boze Hadleigh in his book Hollywood Lesbians (1996), which was published after the deaths of all the interviewees, that she was gay.) It was Tallulah Bankhead (hardly one to be taken aback by drinking or homosexuality) who ended Kelly's long creative dry spell by hiring her as support in the play Dear Charles in 1954. The two carried on a long, stormy and relatively above-ground relationship for years afterward.

Kelly was a fixture on television in the 1960s, making guest appearances on classic shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bonanza, Laredo and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She returned sporadically to movies as well, with featured roles in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964), The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) and as Laura-Louise, one of the sinister coven who befriend Mia Farrow and then betray her to Satan in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). She returned to Broadway in 1971 in the revival of No, No, Nanette with hoofers Ruby Keeler and Helen Gallagher. Kelly scored a huge success as the wise-cracking, tap-dancing maid and won Broadway's 1971 Tony Award as Best Supporting or Featured Actress for her performance in the show. She topped that success the following year when she starred in Irene with Debbie Reynolds, and was again nominated for a Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.



Kelly (third from left) with Irregulars costars Edward Herrmann, Cloris Leachman, Karen Valentine, Virginia Capers and Barbara Harris

The actress ended her film career with two Disney movies that helped to prove that the era at the Mouse House dominated by producer Ron Miller wasn’t a complete disaster-- the original 1976 version of Freaky Friday, and the silly ensemble comedy The North Avenue Irregulars, in which Kelly butted heads (and purses and umbrellas) with a bunch of crooks as well as fellow irregulars Edward Herrmann, Cloris Leachman and Barbara Harris. Patsy Kelly died two years after the 1979 release of The North Avenue Irregulars, in 1981 at the age of 71, of cancer.

The North Avenue Irregulars marked the first time I ever saw Patsy Kelly on screen. (I might have run across her on TV as a kid, but if I did I didn’t remember who she was.) But in that movie I remember being enamored of her tough-old-broad shtick. I grew up around some tough old broads who reminded me a lot of Kelly, and so it’s no wonder I loved her. But it was only recently that I began to encounter Patsy Kelly in her prime, in the comedies and musicals that made her Hollywood name in the 1930s and 1940s. My Son, the Hero was made at the end of the first stage of Kelly’s movie career for Poverty Row director Edgar G. Ulmer. It’s a likable comedy, somewhat turgidly paced (given the lickety-split speed of the movies that can be found at its roots), with a typically farcical plot—a low-rent bookie holes up in the mansion of an associate with his girlfriend (Kelly) and a bunch of their cohorts in an attempt to convince the bookie’s returning war-hero son that his old man is a moneyed big shot. Roscoe Karns as the bookie and professional boxer-turned-actor Max “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom as his gigantic good-natured henchman turn in some pretty snappy work amid Ulmer’s no-frills mise-en-scene (Maxie turns to the camera during one would-be frenetic episode and mutters, “What a screwy picture!”) But Kelly provides My Son, the Hero with whatever oomph that it has, and it seems a rarity among her credits that actually allows the dumpling-shaped actress to bring a bit of sex appeal onto the screen, albeit her own brassy variety.


Much, much better is the other Patsy Kelly vehicle I managed to see in the last month, the gee-whiz college romp Pigskin Parade, which, among other things, happens to be the film debut of Judy Garland. Of course, this bit of casting is probably now the primary reason why most people will pay any kind of attention to Pigskin Parade, along with the early peeks it provides of Jack Haley, Jr., an incredibly sexy Betty Grable, Grady Sutton, Stuart Erwin and even, if you look real close, Alan Ladd. It’s a very typical comedy of the period—lowly Texas State University is invited by Yale, due to a staff miscommunication, to participate in a benefit football game. Before the Ivy League hotshots can blush and correct their mistake, the hale and hearty lads and ladies of the tiny rural campus are fit to bursting with musical energy in celebration of their big opportunity. They even bring in a big coach from the East Coast, the lecherous Slug Winters (Haley), helmed by his no-bullshit pigskin aficionado wife (Kelly), to help guide the meat-and-potatoes squad to victory.

But one night, in a hilarious scene that spotlights her nimble physical ability, Kelly confiscates a flask of gin from a couple of frisky co-eds, gets ripped on it herself and is eventually discovered by her husband drunkenly swinging from a pair of gymnastic rings while the big rally dance roars away just one door over. Suitably berated by Slug, she steps into an adjoining workout room where the team quarterback is licking his wounds after being dumped by his best gal. Mrs. Winters tries to cheer him up by showing him how to take a hit on the field and ends up causing a stack of free weights to fall on him, crushing his leg.

Mrs. Winters, embarrassed by her drunken behavior, is quickly enlisted by her husband to help some of the other students scout for a new quarterback. They eventually make it to the watermelon farm outside of town where Amos (Erwin), who will become the team’s bullet-throwing replacement quarterback, lives. But before they find Amos, the audience is treated to another great Kelly moment, this one a deadpan reaction to the inexplicable musical stylings of Amos’s in-bred relative, who tells the group where Amos can be found, but not before letting fly with a bizarre vocal performance that must be seen to be believed—it’s like Dueling Banjos as it would have played on a Mayberry front porch instead of one found in James Dickey's deepest, darkest Tennessee.


Pigskin Parade is in many ways a very routine musical comedy, but it’s lifted up by its bootstraps (or should that be cleat straps) through the efforts of its excellent cast, of which Patsy Kelly is one of the main anchors. Hers is a tough, sassy demeanor wrapped up in hands-on-the-hips defiance and cat-o’-nine-tails tongue lashings, yet she’s always appealing and genuine underneath the salty exterior. I’d even say that she had a very personable kind of beauty about her in her ‘30s pictures, even up through her wild turn in My Son, the Hero. It sounds strange, but while I was watching and admiring her in Pigskin Parade, and hoping I’d get to see more of her very soon, I saw a very strange confluence in her—Kelly has a frisky ingenue's energy and comic timing, as well as the unglamorous physical appeal and brassy, barking bulldog quality of the best straight-up (no pun intended) broads. She was a worthy contemporary of that other great screen dame, Barbara Stanwyck, and though she never showed the range and greatness that Stanwyck (currently battling Carole Lombard for status as my favorite actress) did, she carved out her own niche and honored it time and again. While watching Pigskin Parade, I kept thinking that Patsy Kelly is who might result if time and space could be breached and science could find a way to deposit Maggie Gyllenhaal and Broderick Crawford in the same body; she’s also a wonder and a hoot to watch and one of my new favorites, and she deserves to be remembered by a lot more movie fans than actually know who she is today. Patsy Kelly once told an interviewer, “In 40-odd years in show business, some years I could do no wrong, and some years I could do nothing right. Show business-- I owe it everything - it owes me nothing.” But you owe it to yourself to find out just how delightful a comic actress Patsy Kelly was—and Pigskin Parade is a great place to start.


(For further reading about Patsy Kelly, here’s an informative essay by Charles Stumpf entitled “Patsy Kelly: Ugly Duckling with an Enlarged Funny Bone”.)

(And don’t forget—Patsy Kelly stars with Marion Davies, Frank McHugh, Robert Montgomery and Barton MacLane in Lloyd Bacon’s Ever Since Eve this Monday, April 9, at 8:30 a.m. PST on Turner Classic Movies.)

SEX AND VIOLENCE x 2: GRINDHOUSE 2007 REPORT

You’ve seen the ubiquitous ads on TV, on buses, on bus kiosks and billboards, and you’ve more than likely read at least one movie magazine or blog article (perhaps on these very virtual pages) devoted to explaining the back story of how directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez conceived their latest opus, the self–contained trash horror double bill that is Grindhouse. And in the next two weeks, before the movie is actually released, if you watch TV or go to the movies you will undoubtedly be subject to much more of the same, albeit at an even more amped-up rate of exposure as the release date continues to creep one day closer.

But if you live in Los Angeles and are of a mind to appreciate it, there’s been a very unique promotion of Grindhouse going on every night at the New Beverly Cinema, an organic offshoot of the monthly Grindhouse Film Festival nights featured at the theater courtesy of exploitation experts Eric Caidin and Brian Quinn. For the months of March and April, Brian and Eric have joined forces with Tarantino to showcase a blistering blitz of exploitation double and triple bills, all culled from Tarantino’s own apparently vast collection of 35mm prints. The two-month long Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival, now near the halfway point of its run at the New Beverly, is designed both to promote and give context to the upcoming Tarantino/Rodriguez homage (after all, it wouldn’t be much of a jump to presume that a good percentage of Grindhouse’s intended demographic has little or no firsthand experience with the golden age of drive-in and downtown movie exploitation that the new movie glorifies), as well as give over one cinema for two solid months to celebrate the real deal, sticky floors, scratched prints, musty smells and all.

And if you do have firsthand experience with said exploitation fare, having seen a goodly amount of it during the ‘70s and early ‘80s, attending the New Beverly’s festival is likely to be a rush of sense memory that seems rare and, dare I say, somehow precious in this age of Moviefone, pristine digital restoration, cup holder-laden stadium seating and, however ominously, 60-inch flat-screen plasma TVs. After over ten years of denying myself the double features the New Beverly has routinely offered, I finally made it out to La Brea and Beverly Sunday night, March 11, for my first Grindhouse Fest double feature, John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder and Charles B. Pierce’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown. According to the calendar, the show was to begin at 7:30, and having no idea what to expect as far as crowds, I made sure I got there in plenty of time to find a parking spot somewhere in the surrounding neighborhood and get a place in line. I strolled up to the box office at about 6:15, and there were two other people already there. I bought my ticket, unrolled the magazine I’d brought along and began to read. It wasn’t long before others arrived in anticipation of the doors opening. And it wasn’t much longer again before the box office attendant came out and informed us devoted standees that the films were running behind schedule (the double feature played that Sunday afternoon as well) and that we wouldn’t actually even be admitted into the theater until about 7:45 p.m.

But I didn’t really much mind. I’ve always enjoyed keeping company with fellow fanatics in joint anticipation of something special, even if just to stand around and people-watch. Soon there was a bustling crowd in line behind me and milling loosely about the general area of the box office window. A bald, mustachioed gentleman and an older, distinguished-looking fella began animatedly talking with a couple of other folks, presumably theater management, who kept rushing in and out of the theater to check how close the afternoon program was to actually finishing. It finally did, at about 7:50, and the attendees of the afternoon show came pouring out, visibly glad to not have to blanch at direct sunlight (it was the first day of Daylight Savings Time, but even so the sun was by now well down), but otherwise looking rather worn, perhaps even bored. Hmm, thought I, not a good sign. They would have just seen The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a period thriller that I saw and enjoyed multiple times in high school, based on accounts of the Texarkana Phantom Killer. The case, and the movie, have superficial parallels with the Bay Area murders chronicled in David Fincher’s superb Zodiac, in that the apparently motiveless killer, who favored lovers’ lane-type locations, was never caught, an open-ended scenario based on case files that the movies (Fincher’s, anyway) explore and exploit for maximum tension. Yet these grindhouse-goers didn’t look wrung out with fear. Could it be that my memory of Sundown was far more generous that the movie deserved?


I found a sweet spot in the smallish auditorium on the right side, on the aisle, and settled in. It soon became apparent that one of the most endearing elements of the Grindhouse Festival experience-- and I can only imagine this holds true for the regular monthly Grindhouse nights at the New Beverly-- was the sense of kindred spirits that made its way rather nimbly through the crowd. Almost immediately, I ran into three people I knew, none of whom I was aware would be attending, and I made two other acquaintances who introduced themselves when they overheard me talking about my blog. And there was a generous vibe that was present in the crowd from the start that was markedly different from the usual hip L.A. scenester gathering that shows up at screenings of bad movies with the express purpose of making sure all around them know that they know enough to laugh at the piece of shit unspooling in front of them. No, these people seemed, for the most part, genuinely respectful, if that’s the right phrase, of the grimy roots of the experience, even if tonight’s double feature wasn’t composed of the usual specimens— both Rolling Thunder and Sundown seemed a little more respectable than the cookie-cutter chopsocky or badly-dubbed Italian gore-fests usually associated with the phrase “grindhouse.” (That particular fix would be addressed by the prodigious bill of trailers on tap that evening.)


I was able to corral Brian for a few minutes and introduce myself. He recognized me from the blog and admitted to posting a gently good-humored harangue in the comments column about my admitting not having been to the New Beverly in 10 years. We talked about mutual friends Haruka and Max, both regular Grindhouse Night attendees who have been trying to get me to come for months, and Brian expressed his excitement for how things had been going during the first week of the Tarantino collection. He also clued me in as to who the Bald Mustache and the Distinguished Gentleman outside the box office were—they were tonight’s special guests, Rolling Thunder director John Flynn (D.G.), and screenwriter Heywood Gould (B.M.) who apparently rewrote Paul Schrader’s original script and fashioned it into what made it onto film. My mind started tumbling— Heywood Gould… Why should I know that name? I didn’t remember at the time, but if I had, I might have actually introduced myself. For, as I discovered when I ran his name through IMDb when I got home, Heywood Gould was not only the director of the atrocious Michael Keaton-Rene Russo vehicle One Good Cop, he also wrote the screenplay for one of my holy texts, the sublimely absurd The Boys from Brazil.

Soon Brian and Eric took the stage in front of the screen to introduce the film, and Mssrs. Gould and Flynn, who spoke for about 15 minutes, telling tales of attempted censorship, threats of bodily harm after marketing screenings, and how the movie was dumped by Fox over its relentless violence and, after being picked up by Samuel Arkoff and American International Pictures, ended up the top-grossing independent picture of 1977. (Fox presumably licked their wounds with the gold-flaked drool generated by Star Wars.) Then 15 or so minutes of wild and wooly trailers for several of the movies coming up at the New Beverly, and finally, at about 8:30, the movie that was supposed to have started at 7:30, finally got underway.

Back to that sense memory of what it was like to see these pictures, in venues both seedy and somewhat more above ground—I’d forgotten what seeing a badly maintained 35mm print of a movie was really like, so obsessed are we these days with sprucing up original negatives and cleaning up visual and aural artifacts and making sure the DVD transfers are struck from the best possible prints and properly color-corrected, usually with the input of the cinematographer and/or director. So even though all those things are good things, I forgave myself the cheap thrill that ran up my spine when that familiar fuzz of the optical soundtrack running over the heads of the projector began popping and crackling and otherwise partying like it was 1977 all over again. There was a direct and immense and palpable pleasure to being able to feel the film the way one feels it while watching a run-down, worn-out, occasionally bleached-out print. It’s a natural phenomenon of age and dust and general disrepair that Tarantino and Rodriguez are reportedly going to great lengths to duplicate in the look and sound of Grindhouse, and if that theatrical trailer is any indication, they’re rumbling up the right alley. Suffice to say, the prints from Tarantino’s collection have not been hermetically sealed in a humidor vault to protect them from the onslaught of elements that lend themselves to the decay of celluloid. I realized, 10 or so minutes into Rolling Thunder, that I was glad for all the rumble and warble and popping and thumping and scratches on this print. As pro-restoration and preservation as I am, all of the prints I’ve seen so far in this festival feel like nothing so much as genuine surviving documents of a certain kind of theatrical distribution and exhibition that is almost as lost as this low-budget strain of B-movie is itself.

I’d never seen Rolling Thunder (1977), but I’d heard plenty of good about it, and it did not disappoint. William Devane is satisfyingly grim as the tortured Vietnam vet who loses his wife and son in a horrific home robbery gone wrong and recedes behind his aviator sunglasses into a private hell of repressed, yet reemerging, memories of wartime violence, and of seething desire to wreak protracted vengeance on the attackers. It’s a good, vicious thriller, directed with plenty of gusto by the undervalued Flynn, who was also responsible for the underrated mob drama The Outfit (1973) starring Robert Duvall, Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan and my beloved Sheree North.

Alas, The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1977) was not the movie my memory had been telling me it was over the past 30 years. In his pre-show speech, Eric admitted it was always one of his favorites too and that, after seeing it at the early afternoon screening, even he had to admit it wasn’t very good. Eric was right. Directed by regional filmmaker Charles B. Pierce, who made his hay four-walling The Legend of Boggy Creek into a notable hit in 1972, Sundown may be based on an actual case, but Pierce’s touch as writer-director (and Barney Fife-esque supporting cast member) is so wobbly that the movie, hobbled from the get-go by portentous Encyclopedia Brittanica-style narration that fills in the holes where all the interesting storytelling should go, never finds a proper tone from which to build a true sense of fear. The movie veers wildly from ineptly staged murders, to long scenes of the police investigators, including an apparently legendary Texas Ranger played by Ben Johnson, standing around wondering what to do, to comic car chase set pieces that advance the story not a whit. By the time the familiar boots worn by the killer (who was never caught) are seen striding into a movie theater line in “modern-day” Texarkana for a screening of, yes, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, all common and narrative sense have been sucked into the black hole of Pierce’s incoherent point of view, and I was just glad to finally have one of my childhood boogeymen exorcised for good. My first night at the Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival finished around 12:30 a.m., just about an hour and a half behind schedule, and although one of the movies was a marked disappointment, the experience was anything but. I was already looking forward to my next chance at a juicy, vintage double feature. I’d done violence. Next up: sex.


Sunday, March 25. I was back in line for another double feature, one that promised another combination of relatively high quality and bottom of-the-barrel contact high that was the exclusive province of the mid-70s drive-in sex comedy. There I was, the only one in line at 6:30 p.m. for a double feature of Roger Vadim’s erotic high school satire Pretty Maids All in A Row (1971) and Richard Lerner’s Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976). At first I worried that the bloom had worn off Tarantino’s stinking rose already, that the novelty of an all-grindhouse schedule had, after three weeks, started to seem less exciting to the general moviegoing public than it had when all this kicked off at the beginning of March. I shouldn’t have worried. By the time my pal Michael and I got our seats, the New Beverly was packed once again, and that same sense of eager, happy anticipation was in the air. Maybe it was because the audience was looking forward to pretty maids gamboling in various skimpy outfits under the tutelage of lecherous high school guidance counselor Rock Hudson instead of William Devane dispensing vigilante justice with a hook where his hand (sacrificed to a kitchen garbage disposal) once was, but the vibe was considerably lighter leading up to show time. (The fact that the screening was on time for 7:30 might have had something to do with it too.)

Brian took the pre-show stage again to talk about some upcoming features (it’s possible that Asian star Nancy Kwan may be in attendance for the upcoming screening of Wonder Women-- stay tuned!) and introduce two of Vadim’s original “pretty maids” who were in the New Beverly audience. Actress June Fairchild, dressed like a cross between Stevie Nicks and Susan Janet Ballion, and the considerably more conservative Margaret Markov bantered for four or five minutes and reminisced about Vadim’s talent as well as his lechery, and then Pretty Maids All In A Row got underway. This was one I was particularly looking forward to, as I’ve always liked Pretty Maids based on one viewing of an understandably cut-and-pasted TV version that I saw when I was 18 or so.

And it was a pleasure to see the eroticism that peeked through the rough seams of that censored broadcast patch job blossom into its fullness (sorry) uncut on the big screen. Pretty Maids is a surprisingly spry and funny submersion of unbridled male fantasy into a high school setting—tortured virgin Ponce de Leon Harper (played by John David Carson in his first movie, and no, I’m not kidding about that name) is taken under the wing of genially lecherous guidance counselor and football coach Michael “Tiger” McGrew (Rock Hudson), who enlists comely substitute teacher Betty Smith (Angie Dickinson, and no, I’m not kidding about that name) to help Ponce through what he terms a rough patch of ineptitude and sexual dysfunction. Of course, Ponce’s only dysfunction is that he hasn’t yet had actual sex, and darned if Betty, after spying his boner and proclaiming her work done, doesn't develop a little attraction to him that eventually leads to the solving of Ponce’s real problem. But Ponce has at the same time discovered the dead body of a cheerleader dumped in a men’s room stall (or cubicle, as he keeps inexplicably referring to it—only screenwriter Gene Roddenberry knew for sure why, and he’s not talking), a body homicide inspector Sam Surcher (Telly Savalas, and again, no, I’m not kidding about that name) begins to believe may have some connection to Tiger McGrew-- especially when the bodies of lovely naked ingénues (including June Fairchild’s) start piling up. If it weren’t so unapologetically goofy and genuinely sexy, Pretty Maids All in a Row might seem a tad on the tasteless side. But even so, its pedigree—Vadim, Roddenberry, a Lalo Schifrin score, and even a main title tune sung by the Osmonds-- and its cast, like Rolling Thunder’s, seems to lift it out of the purview of what would have been considered typical grindhouse fare of the time. It’s down and dirty, to be sure, but it was also a sizable hit upon its release, and it played in a lot nicer cinemas than most of the other movies on the 2007 Los Angeles Grindhouse Fest schedule.


Certainly nicer ones than the ones in 1976 that stooped to exhibit Revenge of the Cheerleaders. I don’t remember if I was ever near a theater that even played this ostensible sequel to the original 1972 comedy The Cheerleaders, and my own awareness of the movie remained vague at best until Tarantino’s festival schedule was announced a month or so ago. I’d already decided I’d see it, mainly because it was attached to Pretty Maids. Then I got an e-mail from Jim Emerson encouraging me to see Revenge-- apparently he’d seen it and vouched for its singularity amongst the spate of R-rated cheerleader comedies of the time. Jim also sent along the keen nontheatrical poster displayed here which, as you might notice, differs somewhat from the original release one-sheet on display at the New Beverly. I saw that poster and immediately began preparing myself for some sort of rally squad take on Caveman, complete with low-grade stop-motion animation, but alas, that brontosaurus ride was conjured up entirely by the marketing wizards at Corinth Pictures, who sustained the movie into the video age after its brief theatrical run.

But who needs rampaging brontosauruses in a movie when you’ve got these cheerleading babes? Revenge of the Cheerleaders roars out of the gate with an exuberant main title sequence chronicling the squad’s happy adventures in both cruising and changing out of their street duds and into their uniforms while driving. Nudity within the first minute of the movie, and scored to a pretty good rock tune too (“I Feel Good,” sung by Cathy Carlson)—so far, so good. Well, incredibly, ROTC sustains that exuberance for almost the entirety of its 88-minute running time. The movie consists of one outrageous, disarmingly funny, unapologetically ridiculous set of hi-jinks after another, with these sociopathic sexpots always placed front and center, and shedding their tops (and bottoms) at the drop of a hat. There is no narrative drive to be interrupted, so when the gang-- the cheerleaders and their basketball-playing boyfriends (one of whom is essayed by a lanky young actor by the name of David Hasselhoff, in the role of Boner) take time out for one of several hilariously choreographed dance sequences, well, it’s like the drive-in equivalent of a musical interlude from Chico and Harpo. (Only a cafeteria food fight in which stuffed shirt school board members, as well as unsuspecting students, are drugged into hysteria commits the capital sin of going on too long.)
There is no curriculum at the "morally compromised" Aloha High School, only figures of authority to disregard or blatantly undermine— these cheerleaders and the rest of the Aloha student body make Riff Randall and her crowd look like straight-A honor society members. The girls and boys only want to have fun, which translates into a heady brew of screwing, playing basketball, cheering, robbing students at a thug-happy rival high school of their drugs (during class!) and riding around in a cherry red 1955 Buick convertible with the top down, and their tops off, of course. (The nudity is democratic too—there’s more than a flash of full frontal male twiggery on view here, including Hasselhoff, though his Boner status, based on this evidence, is overinflated.) It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered such a relentlessly likable feel-good-at-all-costs vibe in any movie, let alone one as low-rent as this one. Tarantino said in a recent interview, referring to discovering treasures in the world of exploitation movies, that not only do you have to drink a lot of milk to get to the cream, with exploitation fare you have to drink a lot of curdled milk to get to the milk. And that’s what Revenge of the Cheerleaders felt like to me Sunday night—the reward for having slogged through a lot of similar comedies that had the sex and nudity but none of the zip and tang and spirit this one has in buckets.

The spirit at work in Revenge of the Cheerleaders is best illustrated by the participation of Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith as one of the main pepsters, known as Heather. Smith, an exploitation queen familiar to fans of films such as The Swinging Cheerleaders, Caged Heat, The Pom Pom Girls, Massacre at Central High, Slumber Party ‘57 and Vice Squad, as well as appearances in above-ground titles like Phantom of the Paradise, Farewell, My Lovely, Up in Smoke and Melvin and Howard, was a natural for this movie, and apparently the director and probably everyone else, wanted pretty badly for her to be in it. Because it’s quite apparent, from that opening credit sequence on, that Rainbeaux Smith is about six months pregnant while playing a high school cheerleader in this film. Her being in the family way just happens to fit perfectly with the movie’s theme of a high school under siege by developers who want to justify razing the property and building a mall on it by publicly condemning the student body as amoral hooligans. But one of the marvels of Revenge of the Cheerleaders is how matter-of-fact everyone is about her pregnancy. They’re so matter-of-fact, it’s never even mentioned until the movie’s epilogue, when someone pats her belly and comments on how nicely that little bun in the oven is coming along. But before that, Smith has romped nude in a wild group shower scene (protruding belly and engorged breasts in full view, obscured only by some soap bubbles), and she’s right in there smoking J’s and hanging out (albeit sometimes in nice, roomy frocks) with the rest of the gang, smack in the middle of all the chaotic comedy.

Right up through that epilogue, which has as much gratuitous nudity, silly laughs and salacious dancing in it as any other section of the picture, I remained giddy over how much I liked this movie. After the end credits, the movie jumps ahead (“Three Months Later” says the title card) and treats us to one last cheer from the titular (sorry) rally squad, who finishes off with a wave to an off-screen observer. The camera then cuts to a shot of a suddenly slender-again Rainbeaux Smith holding her baby in her arms, waving back at the girls and smiling with the shimmer of a real rainbow. It was at that point that Revenge of the Cheerleaders did something no other sex comedy of its kind has ever done—it genuinely moved me.


What a tribute to this plainly beautiful young actress. These nickel-and-dime filmmakers thought so much of her that wanted her in their cheerleader movie no matter how bulbous her belly, and felt so little needed to be made, thanks to her genuinely likable personality, of her condition during the film, that they gave her this touching moment to end their B-movie shenanigans. Earlier I turned to my pal Michael and remarked I was enjoying the movie so much that I was kind of shocked—I told him I was in awe of Revenge of the Cheerleaders. After seeing Rainbeaux Smith, who died in 2002 from complications with hepatitis, cradling her newborn baby at the end of what film historians will never recognize as anything but a crass piece of junk, an artifact from a generally worthless trend in American movies in the ‘70s, I embraced that awe as something genuine-- genuinely unexpected, genuinely touching. Revenge of the Cheerleaders, and the raucously appreciative crowd I saw it with at the New Beverly (whose enthusiasm spilled out onto the street audibly afterward), provided me with more fun than I’ve had at the movies in a long time. How could a comedy this funny, this saucy, this genuinely wild not have a big fat cult following it around and proclaiming its special joys?

UPDATE March 29, 12:04 p.m.: The link to the story of Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith’s life, as written by Chris Barbour, who was close to Smith for a time, and spoke to her shortly before her death, features excerpts from a short letter written by Smith to a friend during the summer of 1985. In it she recounts her favorite film experiences, among them Revenge of the Cheerleaders. Here’s what she wrote to her friend (spelling are grammar are as Smith wrote in the letter):

“REVENGE OF THE CHEERLEADERS: This is my absolute favorite of it's kind. Actually the other one's I'd personally like to forget. And if ever I become a millionaire--there will be a couple of the other ones (we know which!) missing off the shelves forever! Ha. REVENGE is a unique, musical comedy. To get the record straight: The guys--Richard Lerner, great guy. Did the original film (I'm not in it) X rated THE CHEERLEADERS. He did it for 1 reason, $. Which he made & used for his real love REVENGE. This was his joy. I must tell you about the casting. While doing my unfavorite of all times STAND UP & HOLLER I get a call from my agent. After the days shooting I'm to go on this interview. I find out its about CHEERLEADERS. Shit. "You want to see a cheer? I know a bunch!" I say, while I'm thinking this must be what I get for staying out of school to become a working actress. Several days after my appointment, not quite, finished w/ the other picture. I discover I'm pregnate w/ my 1st son, to my 1st husband, ('till this day the last). Anyway when I get called back to see Lerner again, I find his more than serious about me for his film. So I told him of my condition. He was very saddened. I was shocked when my agent called & said they wanted to see me again. Honestly, I couldn't understand why. I went on [word illegible]. Boy was I in for a shocker...Lerner had discussed w/ his partnerrs & writers & decided to write in a pregnate cheerleader! They thought it would be funny--& as it turned out it was a crazy twist. They tried to get a zebra as a mascot & have me ride it, until I told they weren't timable. I worked up until my 9th month w/ an excellent group of gals. Here are these beautiful girls w/ all this energy & me waddelin 'round like a fat duck. One day actually we're doing a night shoot in a giant, closed furniture mall. We're in overtime. The dir. is goin nuts & want to rap the entire thing. He wasn't in the best of moods thats for certain. With our budget overtime wasn't his favorite time! We were, us cheerleader's, in a good mood. The more the dir. yelled, the more outta hand we became & for the life of us couldn't stop laughing. "Shut up!" Lerner yelled. "Now when I say action I want you girls to run down this hallway after the guard as fast as you can!" Then "action!" And we were off runnin as fast as we could. I'm waddling down the way & start to laugh, back to the camera. "Wait! wait you guys, You guys..." 10 feet ahead of me, "please! wait up." Finally I'm laughing so hard i fall to the ground! The girls turn around & see me way back there & they point at me, look at each other, unable to speak. I'm hysterical laughter, fall down on their knees as well. Lerner goes "Thats a take!" Laughing. "Print it!" “

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More from the Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival 2007 coming soon! A peek through the New Beverly box office window reveals a gruesome triple feature coming this weekend-- The Blood-Spattered Bride, Asylum of Blood and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary. Stay tuned.