The Screengrab : lester bangs

Ray Dennis Steckler, 1939 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Ray Dennis Steckler, who died of a heart attack this past week at the age of 70, was, to put it delicately, a major figure in unconventional poverty row cinema of the last fifty years. After a stint in the army, Steckler moved to Los Angeles in 1962, where he found work as a cameraman and cinematographer on such films as Wild Ones on Wheels, Secret File: Hollywood, and The World's Greatest Sinner, the legendary Timothy Carey vehicle that gave its soundtrack composer, Frank Zappa, his first big break. Steckler continued to move in fast company when he teamed up with Arch Hall, an independent exploitation movie mogul who was peddling his guitar-playing simian-faced offspring, Arch Hall, Jr., as a potential teen idol. Arch Senior gave Steckler the chance to make his directing debut with the Arch Junior vehicle Wild Guitar, in which both Arch Hall, Sr. and Steckler also had acting roles, playing crooked music promoters under their favored thespian nom de plumes of, respectively, "William Watters" and "Cash Flagg. (Steckler, as Cash Flagg, also appeared in Hall's Eegah!, in which Arch fils ran afoul of a caveman played by Richard Kiel.) In 1964, Steckler directed, produced, and starred in the film probably best associated with his name(s), The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. (The film also makes use of the dancing talents of Steckler's then-wife, the very hot brunette Carolyn Brandt.) The film, a near-indecipherable mix of filmed variety acts and horror elements involving a plot about a carny fortune teller with the habit of using hypnosis to turn her victims into marauding killers, would attract lasting attention in no small part due to its title, which was actually one of those lucky accidents you hear about. Reportedly, Steckler has originally planned to call the movie The Incredibly Strange Creatures, or Why I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-up Zombie, but for some reason the legal department at Columbia Pictures informed him that this was too close to the full title of Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb for comfort. Steckler would also try out such alternate titles as Diabolical Doctor Voodoo and The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary during the movie's run, which he also spiced up by storming through the aisles of some theaters where the picture was playing, wearing a monster mask and attempting to menace the bemused patrons.

What Steckler could not anticipate was that he had not only created a work that become a cornerstone of the cinema of "so bad it's good", or at least "so bad let's light up a spiff and get off a few wisecracks", but that he had created, in the phrase "incredibly strange", a cult euphemism for "surreally godawful." In 1973, the movie got a big boost in cultdo, when Lester Bangs wrote an article for Creem (later republished in Bangs's posthumous collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung) in which he made comic hay just by describing the experience of trying to make sense of the movie as it flickered across his TV screen. (Trying to sum up "Cash Flagg"'s onscreen presence, Bangs suggested that the auteur looked like Pete Townsend of the Who crossed with Alice the Goon's brother.) Steckler himself--who followed Incredibly Strange Creatures up with Rat Fink a Boo Boo, a curious attempt to send up a send-up, the "60s Batman TV series, before drifting into porn (which he directed under such pseudonyms as "Harry Nixon" and "Cindy Lou Sutton")--would later be interviewed, with Brandt, by Re/Search Publications for the thick 1986 volume Incredibly Strange Films. A couple of years later, he was profiled on British TV by Jonathan Ross for Ross's series about "underground" fimmakers, appropriately called The Incredibly Strange Film Show.

Last year, Steckler used his MySpace page to announce that he was casting a forty-five-year-in-the-making sequel, Incredibly Strange Creatures: One More Time. The finished product, his final film, is due to be released straight to DVD later this year. One incredibly, or at least fairly strange footnote to Steckler's career: he gave two legendary immigrant cinematographers their starts in American moviemaking. Vilmos Zsigmond worked as second unit D.P. on Wild Guitar and as a camera operator on Incredibly Strange Creatures (credited as "William Zsigmond"), before his first real job as cinematographer, on the Arch Hall, Jr. vehicle The Sadist; and Zsigmond's fellow Hungarian refugee, the late Laszlo Kovacs, worked as assistant cameraman on Incredibly Strange Creatures, under the name "Leslie Kovacs."

Ray Dennis Steckler on The Incredibly Strange Film Show, Parts One through Four:

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Lou Reed's Berlin"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Lou Reed's 1973 album Berlin, a song cycle about the abusive love affair between an American junkie and his "German queen" Caroline, has always been regarded as one of the legendary moments from the first ten or twelve uneven, often confused years of Reed's post-Velvets solo career. For a long time, the common consensus was that the record was legendary in the same way as the final flight of the Hindenburg; reviews from the time it was first released tended to rate it as something between an embarrassment and a war crime. But Berlin, whose reputation has improved markedly in recent years, has always spoken to a few of us lost souls, and Reed's great fan and baiter, Lester Bangs, was delighted when his hero told him, in the mid-1970s, that of all his solo releases, the only ones of which he was proud were Berlin and the famously unlistenable Metal Machine Music. What with one thing and another, the busy Reed never got around to performing the whole of Berlin live in concert until December 2006, when the first of several performances of the material was staged in New York City at St. Ann's Warehouse, with Reed's mother in attendance. (Maybe Reed put off doing it so long because he was waiting for his mother to become too deaf to hear what he was singing.)

Lou Reed's Berlin is a concert film directed by Julian Schnabel, who also designed the sets. Jonathan Demme demonstrated the perfect way to make a concert movie more than twenty-five years ago: take the cap off the lens and point the camera at the people on stage, preferably after making sure that they will be well lit. The only thing more mystifying than why nobody thought of it before is why anyone has chosen to do things any differently since. Schnabel, who had images projected on a screen behind Reed during the show (including "home movies" featuring Emmanuelle Seigner, who appeared in Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, as Caroline), sometimes lets these take over the movie for seconds at a time. To my surprise, I didn't mind this so much, maybe because it seemed almost like an homage to the cornball theatrics that the producer Bob Ezrin resorted to on the album, where they actually served to balance and undercut the sogginess of Reed's despair in its more callow moments. (Ezrin himself is in the movie, on stage with the musicians, wearing a smock with the word "BERLIN" stenciled on the back and "conducting" the band, and generally looking like a mad scientist on his day off.) I do wish that he hadn't fiddled with some of the shots of the performance itself. But the band-- which includes the invaluable and time-tested Fernando Saunders on bass, and Tony "Thunder" Smith, who during "Caroline Says (I)" looks so excited about what he's a part of that he's in danger of exploding and leaving a small mushroom cloud behind his drum kit--is in fiery top shape, and at some point early on the driving force of the music renders the movie undeniable. (There's just one conspicuous disappointment in the music itself: Reed almost wrecks one of Berlin's finest tunes--"Caroline Says (II)", as lovely a song as ever included the line, "You can hit me all you want/ But I don't love you anymore"), by trying to act it instead of just singing it.) The assembled back-up singers include young women from the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, dressed in green choral robes. I feel inclined to believe that if you can watch their shining, fresh-scrubbed faces as they sing Reed's nasty words while bobbing their heads happily to the music and not feel thrilled to death, you should probably consider relocating to another, duller planet.

The Ten Greatest Mentors in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical film sticks made-up names on the teenage rock journalist at its center (i.e., Crowe's stand-in) and the rock band he has his big Life-Changing Experience while covering, but Crowe puts Bangs, the legendary editor of Creem, on-screen under his own name, and Hoffman incarnates every loving thing ever written or said about Bangs and makes it look easy. Part of the fascination of Almost Famous is that Crowe presents Bangs as the voice of hard-earned wisdom, and has him share that wisdom with his surrogate out of a spirit of pure generosity, yet the kid violates every rule that Bangs lays down for him, and the way the movie sees it, this all works out great for him. At the time, it must have seemed that this had worked out pretty great for Crowe; as a reporter, he really did cozy up to the rock stars he covered and wrote flatteringly about them (out of what seemed to be real awe for his subjects, rather than opportunism), and the connections he forged couldn't have done him any harm on his path to becoming a big Hollywood writer-director. But resisting Bangs's advice that he learn to temper his sweet enthusiasm with some distance and skepticism--to care more about his art than about others' feelings--he may have done some harm to his ability to extend his range as a filmmaker. In fact, after Crowe's last couple of movies, and the last couple of anthologies with Bangs's material in them, Bangs's career is probably the healthier one now, and he's been dead since 1982.

Howard (Walter Huston), THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)

Howard, the ancient prospector (and proto-ecologist--witness his speech about leaving the Earth "the way we found it"), suggests Yoda crossed with Gabby Hayes, and may be the platonic ideal of the figure of the Western codger who sometimes seems half-mad but has great stores of wiliness and gumption. Drafted by a couple of tenderfeet to bring his experience to a gold-mining venture, he makes his pupils rich, while adhering to the rule that defines so many movie mentor figures: namely, his sage advice does him more good than the people to whom he offers it. When last seen, the old man is preparing to return to the Indian village where he can live out his golden years receiving the royal treatment in exchange for serving as the locals' "medicine man." Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs, the malcontent who scorns fair treatment for his mentor, makes his fortune but gets his lead lopped off before he can haul it back to civilization, while Tim Holt, who treats Howard with the respect that is his due, stays alive but loses his riches and has no recourse but to go back to being Tim Holt.

"Subway Ghost" (Vincent Schiavelli), GHOST (1990(

Lanky at six feet four, with a thick shock of untamed dark hair surrounding a bald pate and a long face like melted ice cream, Schiavelli (who died in 2005) was often cast for the shock effect of his appearance, whether he was playing an asylum inmate in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or a high school teacher in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (where the news that he has a hot-looking wife is good for a laugh). His role as a nameless and very touching spectre in Ghost gave him the chance to play an uncharacteristically direct and fiery character, and he rose to the occasion so fully that, for a few scenes, he actually brought something wholly unearthly to a movie that's mostly about comforting the audience by showing it that death is just another stage of life. Schiavelli seems to know different: being stranded among the living has turned him into the most alienated figure imaginable, and after he's consented to help the hero master his abilities, he abruptly takes his leave, as if he'd just remembered that the movie he's in is meant for those who are sweeter-natured than he has any interest in being.

John (Bruce Dern), THE TRIP (1967)

Never slow to jump on a trend, Roger Corman was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the late 60s, casting Peter Fonda as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. This is like buying the parenting manual by Lynne "mother of Britney and Jamie Lynn" Spears. Nonetheless, Groves agrees to take the drug under the supervision of Dern's unnerving weird-beard character John, and off we go into the lava lamp school of druggy filmmaking — pretty colors and shapes, strobe lights and colored gels. At this point, your more responsible LSD guide would put on some trippy tunes and maybe show you some groovy album covers, but John just sort of snivels and grins and makes Groves feel even more nervous and paranoid with his "hey, it's just a normal ol' chair, buddy" routine. It's even possible that Corman meant John to be a comforting presence, but happened to be out shooting second unit footage for The Navy vs. the Night Monsters the day the casting director learned Dern was willing to work for a sleeping bag and a couple of tuna fish sandwiches. Anyway, Groves' trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he's killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. Then he proves to be an even worse judge of character than we'd previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. Just say no, kids.

Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), REPO MAN (1984)

"Not many people got a code to live by anymore," says Bud, the veteran repo man embodied in all his shambling, world-weary glory by Harry Dean Stanton, who schools our young anti-hero Otto in the tricks of the trade. Bud does have a code, though, and in a movie that ranks among the most quotable of the last three decades, he is a veritable font of direct and concise street-level wisdom. In other words, fuck Yoda. Here are the five elements of the Repo Code we've chosen to live by, and we learned them all from Bud.

5. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either.

4. It helps if you dress like a detective. Detectives dress kinda square. If you look like a detective people are gonna think you're packing something.

3. Look at 'em – ordinary fucking people, I hate 'em. An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.

2. Only an asshole gets killed for a car.

1. Repo man's got all night, every night.

--Phil Nugent; Scott Von Doviak

Click here for Part 1.