The Screengrab : richard rush

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

FEMALE TROUBLE (1974)

Oh, sure, Pink Flamingos has the shit-eating and the egg lady and Hairspray’s the big fat crossover hit, but to my way of thinking, Female Trouble is probably the masterpiece of John Waters’ cinematic career, an epic faux biopic spanning the life of Divine’s iconic Dawn Davenport from adolescence to the electric chair by way of High School Confidential, Butterfield 8 and the weirdest episode of Batman ever. Shock value has always been Waters’ aesthetic and if, say, you were to attend an all-night marathon of his early films tripping your balls off on LSD (like, uh...this friend of mine did once), your jaw would remain in constant droppage at the cavalcade of perversion, blasphemy and scrub-your-brain imagery on relentless display, from Flamingos’ notorious “singing asshole” to Desperate Living’s hung leather goons “digging for gold” in aged Edith Massey’s queenly honeypot. But Waters’ brand of exploitation is so funny and cheerful that, in the end, his off-putting worlds take on a cozy familiarity and you feel nothing but affection for his crackpot characters and the actors who play them, especially Massey (we miss you Edie!)...and never more so than in Female Trouble, which features an endless stream of quotable lines, memorable moments and a brilliant comedic performance by Divine who, as Dawn, not only does flips on a trampoline and trashes Christmas morning like a hell-spawn tornado ("I told you cha cha heels!"), but also gets s/himself pregnant, gives birth and bites through the umbilical cord. Top that, Streep!

MANSON (1972)

This true-crime film, the movie equivalent of one of those instant paperback accounts of tabloid horrors that have been largely displaced by the Internet and reality TV, has the special, weird distinction of being perhaps the only old-Times Square favorite to be nominated for an Academy Award. (It lost out in the Best Documentary Feature category to Marjoe, religious-con-man-turned-Earthquake-cast-member Marjoe Gortner's self-expose, which was almost as sleazy but a lot more self-aware.) Co-directed by Robert Hendrickson, who never made another film, and Laurence Merrick, whose previous credits included The Black Angels and a gay-porn vampire movie alternately called Dracula and the Boys and Does Dracula Really Suck?, it employs a mix of interviews, news footage, home movies and "recreations", with plenty of emphasis on the freaky hippie-orgy scene it imagines as having gone down at the Spahn Ranch. The movie is less concerned with explaining what happened or why than in infecting the viewer with a sense of unease, based on the idea that it all might not be over; it was, after all, made at a time when plenty of Charlie's followers were still living in society and not yet arthritic. The soundtrack, which is made up of dreamy-sounding '60s trance-rock, some of it taken from the Family's own recordings and some of it composed especially for the soundtrack by a couple of Manson's former associates, adds considerably to the overall creepiness. So did the news, in 1977, that Lawrence Merrick had been murdered by an unbalanced stalker, a development that the film's publicists were not shy about hinting at having possibly been delayed "retribution" from the Family.

HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS (1967)

This biker flick, starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Rourke, is about as good as the wheeler genre got. It's certainly better than The Wild Angels, the Roger Corman movie that kick-started the genre and, um, Easy Rider, the counterculture statement that grew out of it. As in Easy Rider, Nicholson plays the audience representative, a fed-up working stiff who impulsively throws in his lot with the biker gang, but here we get to enjoy him for the length of the whole picture. Hells Angels on Wheels was directed by Richard Rush, who would later become best known for the cult film The Stunt Man starring Peter O'Toole -- but the more important reference point here may be that he'd already worked with Nicholson on the West-Coast-hippie-scene movie Pysch-Out. (The list of future Hollywood luminaries who worked on the movie also includes the stuntman Hal Needham and the late, great Hungarian-born cinematographer László Kovács, back when he was billing himself as "Leslie Kovac".) The movie also boasts a wordless appearance by Sonny Barger, the president of the Oakland, California chapter of the Angels, who is also credited as "technical advisor". The movie was made during a brief window when the Angels were willing to work with people who professed to be interested in telling their "story", before they withdrew after becoming rankled about being exploited by sundry show-business types, such as Roger Corman, who they felt screwed them over on The Wild Angels. Add it to Corman's list of accomplishments that he left the members of a self-styled outlaw motorcycle gang with a bad taste in their mouths.

THE INTRUDER (1962)

Roger Corman directed this tabloid melodrama about racist rabble-rousing, from Charles Beaumont's adaptation of his own novel. William Shatner plays a leather-lunged agitator from "the Patrick Henry Society" who arrives in a Southern town torn apart by school desegregation and hits the ground running, making hateful speeches and stirring up trouble. Corman has been known to say that this is the one movie he made in his exploitation-movie prime that he lost money on, always with the implication that he got artistically ambitious and made something too good for his target audience. On the contrary, opines Bill Landis of Sleazoid Express: the film failed in its initial release simply because "not many distributors in [Corman's] distribution network wanted to play a film that used the word 'nigger' every few seconds." Corman wound up selling the movie to a rival exploitation master, Mike Ripps, who made a bundle on it by linking it up on a double bill with another Southern melodrama, Poor White Trash, and devising a two-headed marketing campaign, selling the movie to Northern black audiences under the title Shame and to Southern audiences under the name I Hate Your Guts. Of course, it was its star's later promotion to Starfleet Captain that helped Shame to achieve belated, self-contained lift-off. The movie and Shatner's character lack depth -- it's just a picture of a hateful blowhard, with no psychological layers -- but Shatner's youthful brio gives the picture energy, and after he turned into William! Shatner!, grindhouse audiences loved to come out to screenings of the movie so they could see James T. Kirk toss around the "N"-word.

THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)

This man-eating plant movie, which Roger Corman directed from a script by Charles B. Griffith (who also wrote A Bucket of Blood, The Wild Angels, and Death Race 2000), is kind of awe-inspiring as some kind of ultimate example of just what Corman and Griffith were prepared to throw into the pot to keep one of their stews cooking. (Accoring to Griffith, Corman instructed him to concoct a script as soon as the sets became available, and that he immediately went to work spitballing ideas at Corman, who rejected several proposals before Griffith came up with the man-eating plant idea, by which time, Griffith recalled, "We were both pretty drunk.") Largely shot in two days -- the amount of time Corman had to use the sets, which were left over from another, completed production, before they were torn down -- at a cost of about $30,000 and with a running time of just seventy minutes, Little Shop's performances range from Corman regulars such as Jonathan Haze and Dick Miller, doing their character-guy shtick, to the Borsht Belt delivery of Mel Welles as the flower shop owner Mushnik to Jack Nicholson's unrestrained bit as a masochistic dental patient. The movie's sheer freakishness kept it alive on TV and the drive-in circuit until Nicholson became a star, an unexpected development that instantly turned it into an unlikely classic. It would, of course, go on to be adapted into a 1982 Off-Broadway musical that was in turn adapted into a big movie musical in 1986. None of which did Corman any good, because he had such sad hopes for the movie's commercial prospects that he never bothered to copyright it, allowing it to slip into public domain.

Warning! No one will be admitted after Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

According to conventional Hollywood wisdom (which, of course, is never wrong), movies about the moviemaking process are bad box office bets, since the subject is far too esoteric for mainstream audiences, too “inside” for Joe Multiplex. Never mind that Americans are obsessed with pop culture, with every other person in the nation either writing a screenplay, uploading their own mini-masterpieces to YouTube and/or tracking box office returns, buzzworthy coming attractions and day-to-day movie star minutiae in every form of media from Entertainment Tonight and our own humble website to CNN and Cigar Aficionado magazine. And never mind the fact that movies about movies are just as likely to succeed (Get Shorty, The Blair Witch Project...yes, The Blair Witch Project! They were making a movie, remember?) or fail (that awful Alec Baldwin/John Cusack movie I rented a few months ago about a fake movie financed by the FBI...ugh) as any other genre.

Naturally, as film geeks, we here at The Screengrab have always had a special place in our black little hearts for stories about the high-powered moguls and desperate hustlers drawn like doomed moths to the lights, cameras and especially action of the Dream Factory (in all its forms).

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be rushing out to see Ben Stiller’s latest comedy (about a group of spoiled actors who start off shooting a war film and wind up in a real shooting war), but the release of Tropic Thunder does give us a chance to reflect on past favorites from our favorite post-modern genre: movies about movies!

AMERICAN MOVIE (1999)

As Spinal Tap is to rock and roll, so American Movie is to the world of low-budget independent filmmaking. Detailing working class Wisconsinite Mark Borchardt's failed attempts to launch production of his dream project Northwestern and subsequent determination to complete the 35-minute horror film Coven, Movie is both hilarious and thoroughly moving. The pitfalls of no-budget filmmaking provide some of the most uproarious moments, such as a Coven scene in which Borchardt's character shoves his support group sponsor's head through a non-breakaway cabinet door, but the film's surprising emotional depth derives from Borchardt's relationships with his family and friends, including gentle burnout Mike Schank and the increasingly decrepit and fatalistic Uncle Bill. Schank's maniacal screeching during a sound effects dubbing session and Uncle Bill's repeated attempts to nail his single line of dialogue leave some doubt as to whether Borchardt will be able to pull off his project, but the finished product reveals flashes of wit and an eye for the sort of harsh, gloomy compositions he professes to admire (as well as some admittedly Ed Wood-level writing and acting). Last time we checked, Borchardt was still hoping to make Northwestern, but even if he never pulls it off, the essence of that dream project informs this documentary, investing it with an indomitable spirit and passion for life.

STATE AND MAIN (2000)

When David Mamet set his poison pen to a Hollywood satire, the result was far from the scathing warts-and-all expose one might expect from the author of Glengarry Glenn Ross. Instead, State and Main is a frothy, good-natured screwball comedy pitting the cast and crew of what appears to be an earnest period melodrama, The Old Mill, against the residents of their filming location, the quintessentially picturesque New England town of Waterford, Vermont. William H. Macy is the exasperated director, Alec Baldwin is the leading man with a weakness for underage girls, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is the screenwriter forced to rewrite his script when it turns out Waterford doesn't have an old mill after all. The usual course of events would have the simple but good-hearted natives teaching the soulless Hollywood invaders a lesson or two about small town values, but that's not what Mamet is up to here. He knows media-saturated America has reached the point where everyone's a show biz insider; thus a scraggly pair of diner denizens chew over Variety's weekend box office figures while the cook ponders the trajectory of Warner Bros. stock since 1985. Locals and La-La-landers alike get their fair share of jabs, but the tone is generally more affectionate than condescending or malicious.

THE STUNT MAN (1980)

Richard Rush's kinetic action comedy -- in which a possibly crazy Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback) on the run from the law takes refuge among the crew on a location film shoot and discovers that, compared to a bunch of Hollywood professionals, he doesn't know from craziness -- features maybe the greatest depiction of a big-time movie director ever caught on film: Peter O'Toole as Eli Cross, a megalomaniac and a madman but not a bad guy. Eli, who's trying to keep the people working under him simultaneously entertained and cowed while doing whatever he can think of to inject some purifying "madness" into the stock World War I movie he's shooting, makes his entrance in a helicopter and is often perched seated on a crane, so that he can dip into the frame from on high; "If God could do the tricks we can do," he cackles, "He'd be a happy man!" As Rush's reward for having made one of the best movies about moviemaking, he got to watch as his picture became semi-legendary for the efforts of the studio to declare it unreleasable despite fawning reviews and solid business when they booked it into a West Coast theater for a weekend just to prove that it would bomb.

THE BIG PICTURE (1989)

This was the first feature film directed by Christopher Guest, but it's not a "mockumentary"; it's a scripted comedy starring Kevin Bacon as an eager, idealistic young director whose award-winning short film gets him snatched up by a big studio, which promises him carte blanche to make his first real movie. He goes straight into the shredder head first. Far superior to Guest's more recent For Your Consideration, it features a stellar rogue's gallery of Hollywood phonies, including J. T. Walsh and Tracy Brooks Swope as revolving-door studio heads, Teri Hatcher as a starlet looking for the right shark to hook onto, Jennifer Jason Leigh as a confused young would-be artist, and most amazing of all, Martin Short as a scumbag agent. With his frizzy 'do and lying eyes, he looks like a Hobbit who found the One Ring and pawned it for a ticket to L.A.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Baghead Snubs New York, L.A.

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Those of who live in the 99.999% of the country that lies between New York and Los Angeles long ago came to terms with being second class citizens when it comes to movie release dates. Sure, we’ll get your Indys and Hulks at the same time as everyone else, but it’s always irritating when the rave reviews for a There Will Be Blood start rolling in and we still have to wait two months to see it. We’ll begrudgingly admit that it does make some sense for movies seeking buzz to open in the two largest media centers first, particularly late in the year when Oscar-qualifying rules require week-long runs in New York and L.A. theaters. Still, in an online age when buzz is transmitted globally with a single keystroke, the platform release begins to seem like an outmoded convention.

Still, it’s at least somewhat gratifying when a movie bucks the conventional wisdom and opens in one of these other American cities you may have read about or seen on the TV. As Michael Cieply notes in the New York Times, it does happen on occasion. “Thus Samuel Goldwyn Films four years ago picked up the New Age semidocumentary What the Bleep Do We Know? after its producers had already found an audience in the Pacific Northwest. It then expanded the release to other heartland cities but stayed out of central Manhattan, confining itself to what Goldwyn’s president, Meyer Gottlieb, called ‘the fringes’ of New York…In June 1980, 20th Century Fox defied conventional logic by opening The Stunt Man, directed by Richard Rush and starring Peter O’Toole, in Seattle. Months later, when it played New York, the film was panned by The Times.”

The latest example is Baghead, the mumblecore horror movie from the Duplass brothers. “The movie will show first in Austin, Tex., where its writer-directors, the brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, got their filmmaking careers in gear. Then Baghead will probably move on to Dallas, Houston or, maybe, Portland, Ore. — cities that, in the words of Tom Bernard, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, ‘tend to connect with what’s new and different.’ In July or August, if all goes well, Baghead will finally make it to screens in Manhattan and West Los Angeles, where independent film gems are supposed to be discovered by sophisticated viewers who live on the culture’s cutting edge. Or used to.”

Mark and Jay Duplass spoke with the Austin Chronicle about the strategy. “Too often with a small movie like Baghead,” Mark says, “if you open it in New York or L.A., it never gets a chance to find its legs. We liked the idea of opening up in a place where people might give it a chance and where it actually might play for more than a week or two before it gets knocked out by the next big summer movie… Austinites are smart, and they're looking for something different; you've gotta keep them on their toes. For us, Austin is the quintessential movie-watching town, because people there will go to the movies without even knowing what they're going to see, just to see something new.”

Related:
Tribeca Film Festival Review: Baghead