The Screengrab : judy davis

Ozsploitation! “High Rolling in a Hot Corvette” (1977)

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Inspired by the terrific new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, the Screengrab is proud to present Ozsploitation!, our own survey of the golden age of Australian drive-in movies. Pop a tube, throw another shrimp on the barbie and try not to chunder.

I’ve had pretty good luck with my Ozsploitation selections…until now, that is. Granted, I had no reason to believe High Rolling in a Hot Corvette was any sort of lost classic. The title promises good times, but I learned long ago that such promises are not always kept by the exploitation film complex. Otherwise The Great Texas Dynamite Chase would be the greatest time I ever had (whereas in fact it barely cracks the top twenty). The only people who might have any interest all in High Rolling would be Judy Davis completists, as the actress makes her motion picture debut in it. She may leave it off her resume these days, but that’s why we love IMDb.

The fun begins in a Queensland carnival, where Tex (played by obligatory American import Joseph Bottoms, least of the acting Bottoms brothers) operates the shooting gallery on the midway. On a whim, he and Aussie buddy Alby (Grigor Taylor) decide to take a road trip, hitching a ride with a fella named Arnold in his snazzy corvette. When the gang stops at a motel for the night, Arnold makes an unexpected pass at Alby and an unpleasant bout of gay-bashing ensues. Tex and Alby make off in the corvette, little realizing that the boot (that’s the trunk, my fellow Americans) is full of marijuana.

Judy Davis plays a wispy young hitchhiker who plans to become a prostitute until Tex informs her that this will entail sweaty fat men squatting over her, belching and farting. She never really thought of it that way, but Tex is such an incredibly repulsive individual, this sort of thinking is second nature to him. Fellow Screengrabber Andrew Osborne and I have a little game we call Long Car Trip. For instance, he’ll say: “Long car trip – Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh?” Then I’ll have to pick one and come up with some sort of rationale for preferring to spend many hours trapped in a vehicle with this individual. In this game, Tex will always be the wrong answer – and yet here is a whole movie about taking a long car trip with him. Amazing.

The gang eventually ends up in Surfers Paradise, which is a real place that looks like this. A better movie would have done something more interesting with this unusual location (this is the “paradise” the Road Warrior refugees were trying to find), but in High Rolling, it’s just a scenic spot for Tex to pass out on his face. Eventually the plot kicks in again as the pot goes missing from the boot, the boys decide to hold up a tour bus, and Arnold and his buddies catch up with Tex and Alby for the big showdown. Unfortunately, they do not beat Tex to death with his own feet, which is really the only ending that would justify sitting through this irritating snoozer.

Previously on Ozsploitation:
Dead-End Drive In
Roadgames

The Top Ten Uncompleted Movies, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The sad death of Heath Ledger caused speculation that the film he had been shooting, Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, might be in jeopardy. This isn't the first time that the loss of a principle cast member has threatened to shut down a movie. Witness the battle Doug Trumbull had to fight to keep Brainstorm from being written off when Natalie Wood died. Of course, there are various movies that had not been finished for one reason or another, some through accidents and others to a simple lack of interest. What follows is a list of 10 of the more promising or at least potentially interesting films that were not released in their intended form for one reason or another.

--Faisal A. Qureshi

DARK BLOOD

River Phoenix's death in October 1993 led to the complete shutdown of George Sluzier's film. Already a troubled production, with reports of tension between Judy Davis and Phoenix, the film only had 11 days of shooting left before tragedy struck. The British company Palace Pictures, which was funding the production, decided that the film couldn't be salvaged. Even though Jim Barton's script received a postive reception when it was given a read through by the Script Factory, there have been no takers for trying to re-shoot or complete the picture.

THE MAN WHO SHOT DON QUIXOTE

Terry Gilliam's first experience of getting a film written off was luckily recorded in a documentary, Lost in La Mancha, shot by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. After one week of shooting, Jean Rochefort, injured himself while getting on a horse, flew back to France and received doctor's orders to never ride again. There are rumours that Jeremy Thomas would take over the project and re-start production with Johnny Depp still attached, but until then all we have are rushes of Depp berating a fish.

I, CLAUDIUS

The 1976 BBC Adaptation of Robert Graves I, Claudius has been hailed as one of the greatest works of British TV drama. Forty years earlier, however, Alexander Korda tried producing a feature adaptation of the book starring Charles Laughton as Claudius and Merle Oberon as the nymphomaical Messalina, with Josef Von Sternberg directing. Unfortunately, Merle Oberon suffered an accident that resulted in the abandoning of filming. Luckily, the footage that had been completed survived and was later the center piece of the excellent BBC Documentary, The Epic That Never Was, which was itself released to film theaters.

ORSON WELLES'S DON QUIXOTE

Orson Welles had worked on Don Quixote for years, going through various scripts and cast changes, and shooting in Mexico and Spain. Financed out of his own pocket, Welles started shooting in 1955 just after he was kicked off the editing of Touch of Evil, and carried on until the death of his Sancho Panza, Akim Tamiroff. Strangely enough, the job of assembling the surviving footage into something coherent was given to Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jesus Franco, who had been Welles's first assistant director during some of the shooting. Reviled when it premiered in Cannes, it leaves one hoping that someday there will be another attempt to "complete" the job by someone with more artistry and closer to Welles's own wavelength than a second-rate horror hack.

SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE

Marilyn Monroe's final film, which was shelved after her death. On paper it looked great, with George Cukor directing and a cast that included Phil Silvers and Dean Martin. The story, a remake of the 1940 My Favorite Wife (which was itself derived from Tennyson's "Enoch Arden") involved a husband who has his wife declared dead after she's been missing for five years, only for her to turn up when he's getting re-married. Unfortunately Monroe's inability to come in to shoot her scenes (she was apparently off 17 days out of 30 of the duration of the production) and with Fox hemorraging money from the even more expensive, Cleopatra, decided to sack the actress and re-organise the production. Unfortunately, Monroe's death killed the project altogether, and it wasn't until 1999 that Fox allowed the release of 39 minutes of footage shot for the film to celebrate Monroe's 75th birthday. (My Favorite Wife was ultimately remade as Move Over, Darling, with Doris Day and James Garner.)

--Phil Nugent, Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 2.

No, But I've Read The Movie: NAKED LUNCH

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Today, the Screengrab introduces a new semi-regular feature, in which we look at movie adaptations of high-profile novels. Movies based on books are a dime a dozen -- or at least they were before around 1998, when every single movie became based on a television show that originally aired between 1971 and 1983. But movies based on good books are still rare enough to warrant a closer look, possibly because the qualities that make a good book are rarely the same qualities that make a good movie. Great novels tend to focus on philosophy, psychology, and internal narrative, while great movies often emphasize action, movement and dialogue. All too often, the word "unfilmable" is applied to truly ambitious and complex fiction, as if the very idea of encapsulating on screen what so impresses us on the page is laughable on its face, and nowhere is this more obvious than in 1991's Naked Lunch. David Cronenberg, with his literary pretensions, obsession with mutated human bodies, and appetite for the grotesque would seem to make him a natural for making a movie version of William S. Burrough's infamous Beat-influenced black comedy; but even with a like-minded director, filming Naked Lunch would be an uphill battle. It's not a narrative novel in the traditional sense -- or any sense, really; it's more a series of vignettes, impressions, monologues and riffs, more like a heroin-soaked jazz fugue than a story. Even if Cronenberg could find a way to make Burroughs' masterpiece palatable to an audience without getting an X rating (Burroughs was rather fond of notions like talking assholes and rectal mucous), could he make any narrative sense out of a non-narrative novel?

WHAT IT HAD: A director who had read, enjoyed, and understood the novel, and who was writing the script himself to avoid any conflict of vision. A decent budget for an indie film. A studio willing to indulge the often-disturbing creative vision of its author. A built-in cult audience. A game cast, including a terrifically deadpan performance by Peter Weller as Burroughs' alter-ego, Big Bill Lee; a juicy, sympathetic turn by Judy Davis as Burroughs' wife and muse, Joan; and a hilariously fiendish, toothy ham-job by Roy Scheider as the nefarious Dr. Benway. A determination to make the most of its vision and to find clever work-arounds for the book's sometimes incoherent narrative structure. Moments of brilliance in the soundtrack by free jazz giant Ornette Coleman. And most importantly, a nastily sympathetic sense of humor.

WHAT IT LACKED: A mainstream audience that would make the whole thing worthwhile. A group of fans who would forgive any variance from their beloved source material. A willingness to turn over the reins entirely to Coleman, resulting in some plodding, ham-handed incidental music from Howard Shore. A budget big enough to keep some of the special effects from seeming hokey and cheap. A tight focus on how to involve all of the book's best moments, resulting in a somewhat fuzzy sense of direction at times. The will to completely overthrow narrative entirely and bring to the film a permeating experimental quality such as is found throughout the book. A critical audience who had any interest in seeing such a bizarre novel get made into a movie in the first place.

DID IT SUCCEED?: Mostly, yes -- and in a very unusal way. Cronenberg figured out early on that if he was going to make a movie out of Naked Lunch at all, he was going to have to make it something entirely different than the book, which, as trite as it is to say, is almost entirely unfilmable. So, after hammering out a script that he was happy with and securing a lead actor both capable and sympathetic to his vision, he proceeded not to make a film adaptation of the novel, but a clever and inventive metaphor for the circumstances of the writing of the novel. The result is less a literary adaptation than it is an extremely deceptive, but in no sense unsuccessful, biopic; if it fails to give us a faithful sense of Burroughs' work, it at least gives us a faithful sense of Burroughs, and that's quite a kick in itself.