Public Domain Friday: Latitude Zero

Here, got a movie for you.

I was completely unaware of this movie until last night, when it turned up in my Amazon Prime recommendations. What is this? I said. Joseph Cotton and Ceasar Romero in submarines? Directed by the guy responsible for all those Godzilla movies in the sixties? I'M IN!

If you didn't grow up watching it on Creature Features, it's probably for two reasons. One is that it's predictably awful. Joseph Cotton seems to be kicking off his late-career headlong dive into humiliation here. It's a few years before Lady Frankenstein and The Abominable Dr Phibes, and how he consented to wearing this costumes (and I swear, it must be a little lipstick and rouge also) can only be explained by a need for money or some really strong kink we never found out about. Romero fares better, if only because he'd been doing Batman for a couple years and was comfortable with camp.

The other reason appears to be the usual legal battles. The movie is an international co-production between Tojo studios and Four Star Productions, an American television production company. But early in the production, after flying Americans to Japan for shooting, Four Star went bankrupt and left the movie to soldier on with half the budget intact. Then once the initial TV rights expired they were held up in a legal battle which kept it out of sight for decades. It's only now that ALL rights have expired that you can see this. 

2019 Best Picture Nominees: Place Your Bets

For the first time in a long time, I actually saw all nine of the Best Picture nominees this year. Here’s what I found notable about them, and a stab at prognostication

FORD V FERRARI – It’s been called a “Dad Movie” and it is: A Boomer story about the one thing Boomers really care about: cars. In this film you can see the humble origins of all the obnoxious high-performance supercars currently being driven around by midlife-crisis millionaires and decadent oil-money royal nephews: Ferrari, Shelby, McLaren, etc. Feels like a fill-in nominee, but Christian Bale has a slim chance to score a win.

THE IRISHMAN – A Netflix offering from Martin Scorsese. I’d argue that, like JOKER, it's an imitation of a Scorsese core cinematic offering, despite the fact he directed it. Really more of a Robert De Niro film: he was instrumental in packaging the deal and bugging Joe Pesci 20+ times until he came out of retirement to participate. It’s overly long, which has a lot to do with the production oversight methods of Netflix (more below) then actually having three hours of story to tell. Look at a few acting nods, but not a Best.

JOJO RABBIT – This is the one film that I consistently forget is in the running. Not that it’s forgettable: it’s such a singular, unique film that it doesn’t fit into the mental framework of Oscar movies. It’s a comedy / drama about 10-year-old Hitler Youth member during the last months of World War II. His imaginary friend is Adolph Hitler, and his core beliefs are challenged when he discovers a Jewish girl hiding in the attic of his house. So it’s a strange setting for a comedy, but a very worthy film-- one that I’m afraid will get passed over because stories like this make some people queasy.

JOKER – Perhaps the first superhero movie (or rather a supervillain movie) from either major imprint to get a Best Picture nod. It may well take the big prize: JOKER has a polished look with solid art direction. It’s also a nihilistic story that is centered on explaining away the creation of a murderer as a product of hard times. It does not quite justify him, though, which is where Joaquin Phoenix’s remarkable performance comes in, pushing against the amoral narrative. It may well take the big prize.

LITTLE WOMEN – This is a fine film, filled with great performances and meticulous art direction (it will get Best Costume because, as we all know by now, Best Costume always goes to the movie where actors wear clothes that look like costumes). The story was given the Tarantino script-blender treatment, transformed from a time-linear narrative to a flashback / flash forward style that breathes a considerable amount of surprise and energy into the familiar tale. Great Gerwig did not get a Best Director nod, which usually means it won’t take the big prize.

ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD – QT really mended some fences with me with this film, which luxuriated in the sunny universe of Hollywood in 1969. It will appeal to Academy voters ‘cos it is a very flattering look at their own industry, giving it the standard glossy take as a creative, glamorous place where dreams come true. However the gory, historically inaccurate, needless ending will sink this film.

MARRIAGE STORY – Another Netflix joint. The performances by Scarlett Johansen and Adam Driver are electric, riveting and devastating. I get the feeling one or both will be rewarded. The film itself was… fairly good? It felt like a TV movie, and it suffered from the same problem most Netflix features have: it’s sloppy, underbaked, feeling a lot more like a first edit than a final cut. This has a lot to do with how these films are financed: Netflix is not trying to sell movie tickets. These films are made to generate buzz for a streaming service, which is trying to increase subscriptions. Absent the need to compete one-on-one, Netflix does not insist on one more script polish, one more effects pass, one more edit. Look at the downstream offerings on Netflix and you can really see this oversight philosophy in action.

PARASITE – This is, hands down, the best film of 2019. Enormous creative energy in the direction, photography and design, the acting is superb, and the story is both timely and utterly unique. It tells the story of a poor family which figures out a way of gaining the employment of a rich family through deception and clever thinking. Unfortunately it a Korean film in Korean: there are a certain percentage of film viewers who simply do not like reading subtitles. I HOPE it gets best picture, so I’ll just make it my personal pick.

1917 – a visually and technically superior gimmick film that is staged as one long continuous take. It tells the story of two young soldiers on a perilous mission to deliver a message behind enemy lines. The problem with gimmick movies is the gimmick overwhelms everything else, like story or acting performances. So even though it is a visual spectacle, 1917 is an emotionally static affair. I spent most of my time looking for the parts where they hid the cuts— when a tree is in the foreground or when the scene enters darkness. This film already took some significant pre-Oscar industry awards, and Hollywood may well reward it: they do love their bright, shiny objects.

In a few weeks, we’ll see how I did!

Tarantino the Nostalgic Unreliable Narrator

I went into Once Upon a Time in Hollywood expecting not to like it that much: he burned me very badly with his cute switcheroo act with The Hateful Eight, a film he touted as an epic widescreen roadshow movie but turned out to be a blood-drenched, claustrophobic indie film that had no earthly reason to be in Ultra Panavision 70.

But after thinking about it for a while afterward, I have a grudging respect for this film. Once Upon a Time is built around an original story, unusual for him: its not a pastiche or an homage or a dully executed re-make of some cheap exploitation film. It’s really him, talking directly to us and not through some faux-junk, schlocky exploitation genre— and God damn it if that isn’t refreshing. Quentin succeeds at his primary goal here: creating an alternate universe version of Los Angeles in 1969. He did a splendid job of it. The dialog is crisp, mostly lacking the big gobs of “Tarantino-speak” that bogged down earlier efforts, and the acting snaps as well. It’s a longish film, and his obsession with the trappings of the past often overwhelms his story, but more worth your time than any of his films since Jackie Brown.

On to the notes!

Nostalgia: Once Upon a Time drowns in nostalgia, aching and wistful and angry at the passage of time that erased the treasures lovingly displayed onscreen. Quentin Tarantino is a filmmaker driven by desires— obscure action cinema, violence, glib dialogue, women’s bare feet. But this time his desire is the past. His past, a past he has said was the favorite time of his childhood.

Once Upon a Time is Quentin the video-store clerk and kid who grew up in LA in the 1960s and 1970s, finally brought to his fullest. It’s a wishlist of everything he ever wanted to do in a movie as a kid, pattered out in his characteristic staccato: he wants to be a TV western star (Quentin Tarantino was named after Burt Reynold’s character in “Gunsmoke”). He wants to beat up Bruce Lee. He wants to change Hollywood history (more later). He wants to set an LP needle down right on the gap before his favorite song (this happens several times) and hear the KHJ and KFWB jingles ring out over an AM car radio again. He wants to make a movie with Steve McQueen and Michelle Phillips and Sharon Tate. He wants all he knew and saw and loved as a child returned to him.*

But most of all, he wants to go home to the past. You can feel it: his longing reaches right out of the frame. It’s all there in broad strokes: late 60s Hollywood Boulevard lovingly recreated; classic, unchanged locales like Musso and Frank and El Coyote visited. There’s a montage near the end of the film that gave one of the biggest thrills of the movie: night falls and long-gone business facades light up. There’s an old Der Weinerschnitzel, a Mission-style Taco Bell, The Cinerama Dome restored to its Pacific Theaters glory.

Tarantino is one year younger than I am, and I spent some time in LA around this time as well— down in sleepy suburban Lynwood rather than Hollywood, but I know these sights, the look and feel of the era. I’ll admit one of the strongest reactions I had to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a strong desire to move into this film. I didn’t want to leave. I’m not sure if 1969 was a better world than 2017, but the version he showed us was simpler, shinier, and undeniably beautiful.

Two-person, one-character protagonist: washed-up star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt-double/dogsbody Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) are the inseparable pair at the center of the film. They make a very big deal out of the fact that Rick can’t function without Cliff, and vice versa. This makes it easy to pin this relationship as a Tarantino staple, tough guy male bonding. But it goes far deeper than that. Rick and Cliff are the same character. They cannot exist outside of the definition they have for each other. The two characters span one complete male personality. Rick is insecure, weak, vain and sensitive (he cries like three times in the film), but also talented and ambitious. Cliff is taciturn, strong, highly capable and practical, but also lacks ambition to the point he is content to live in a wreck of a trailer in North Hollywood. A lesser effort would have these traits embodied in one overly complex, somewhat unbelievable character: in Once Upon a Time this one character is smeared over two individuals, yin and yang, completing each other in all ways, functioning as one complete person. This sort of split character has been done in other films, but usually the other way: in biopics they make they take handfuls of real historical figures and smoosh them into one character.

History and the Unreliable Narrator (mild spoilers): Once Upon a time in Hollywood follows three intertwining storylines, much like Pulp Fiction but without time-shifting tricks: Rick and his buddy Cliff, trying to re-start a failed Hollywood career; Sharon Tate’s arrival in Hollywood, and— lurking like an evil portent— the Manson Family, biding their time in an abandoned movie ranch in Chatsworth, waiting for their call to the stage.

Anybody familiar with recent history knows what happened the night of August 8, 1969: Four members of the Manson Family entered the house on 10050 Cielo Drive in the LA hills and murdered everyone inside, including actor Sharon Tate. Not to give away anything specific, but this is not what happens at the end of Once Upon a Time. Something completely made-up happens.

Quentin Tarantino has done this sort of “alternative historical fiction” thing before: he killed the living hell out of Hitler in a French movie theater in Inglourious Basterds. And by all means he has every right to do so: he’s the storyteller here and he has a right to re-tell historical events any way he wants to. When you get right down to it, every filmmaker who ever shot a narrative film is a total and complete liar. You can plot a line straight through the relative level of reality in any filmmaker’s work, from hyper-real (Zero Dark Thirty, The Grapes of Wrath, HBO’s Chernobyl) to utter fantasy (Toy Story 4, Lord of the Rings, Top Gun) with lots of shading in-between. And the hyper-real ones are still mostly made-up hooey.

But the tall tale Tarantino is spinning at the conclusion of Once Upon a Time does something very strange. If the terrible thing that is supposed to happen on the night of August 8, 1969 doesn’t happen, what was the point of two-thirds of the film? In other words, if you showed this film to somebody with NO IDEA of the history Quentin Tarantino is re-writing, what would she make of it? She would sit through long sequences of Sharon Tate wandering around Los Angeles, shopping, seeing herself in a movie theater in Westwood. She would see long sequences of Manson Girls wandering around Los Angeles barefoot, hitchhiking and hanging around Spahn ranch. But they never really connect: all the long minutes of foreboding and build-up are dissipated in a standard Tarantino gory ending. Our historically ignorant movie viewer would leave the screening wondering why those other sequences even exist.

Does a filmmaker owe fidelity to historical facts? I don’t know. What I do know is this film will be seen by people 50, maybe 100 years from now. The Tate-LaBianca murders will no longer be a part of living history: to these future viewers, they’ll be as familiar with the actual events as we are of the details of the murder of Stanford White in 1906. Which is to say they may very well accept Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s ending as actual history. This is how history gets distorted: it does not seem important now, but we owe some debt to the future to tell the truth.

*Quentin Tarantino put himself in this film twice, even though he had no cameo. In one segment Rick Dalton is resting between set-ups in a western backlot set next to a precocious child actor (Julia Butters). She is roughly the same age QT would have been in 1969, and you can hear him talking through her as she engages Rick in some positive affirmation. Later in the film one of the characters announces a move to “a condo in Toluca Lake,” likely the same one occupied by Jimmie and Bonnie 25 years later in Pulp Fiction (1994).

Apollo 11: Best "Found-Footage" Doc EVER

First of all, I was there for the real thing: July 20th, 1969, when Neil and Buzz of Apollo 11 walked on the moon. A moment in history never to be forgotten or repeated, the day the cold, lifeless universe began to yield to humanity's will. I did not think in such grandiose terms at the time, of course, being seven years old-- but nothing could have pried me away from our Motorola console TV that day, not for all the candy in the world (and the candy was very good in 1969).

We had relatives over and everyone watched with wonder-- except my uncle Jim, who had a big lunch and was passed out in dad's Barcalounger, snoring through the whole thing. I was annoyed with him at the time, but now I realize he had a half-good reason to be zonked out: For such a momentous event in world history it was not a particularly interesting one to watch. Neil's step onto the lunar surface was carried live, but it was a super-contrasty monochrome image. The networks carrying the moon landing used a lot of cheesy animation, simulations and talking heads to pad out the low-res NASA video feed. The astronauts had to return to the earth, with it's plentiful film processing facilities, with magazines of exposed 16mm movie film and 70mm still images to give us the iconic imagery we associate with the era.

Live video of Armstrong on the moon looked like this.

The media status for early manned spaceflight hasn't changed that much: Grainy 16mm and low-res video (some in color), backed up by more 16mm TV coverage. When documentary filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller set out to make a 50th anniversary tribute of the Apollo 11 mission, he started out with the same resources everyone else had since the Nixon era: The familiar stills and grainy news footage, the same warbling audio.

Then two remarkable archives of previously unseen and rarely heard content were discovered.

The Mitchell AP65, very likely one of the cameras used
to document the Apollo missions.

The first discovery was the identification, deep in the vaults of the National Archives, of 165 reels of well-preserved Todd-AO 65mm film negative documenting the Apollo missions, from 8 to 14. These had been stored-- unseen-- since they were shot. Nobody even knew WHY this incredible trove of film existed: There was a tenuous connection to a failed co-production between NASA and MGM pictures, and this precious footage may have been outtakes from this effort. It is more likely that some unknown Public Affairs Officer at NASA wanted a definitive archive document for this extraordinary moment in human history, in the highest fidelity possible. In terms of capturing detailed, realistic imagery, 65mm was about as good as you could get in the late 1960s-- The resolution is the equivalent of 13K digital, a DCP format that does not currently exist because it would melt the image processors.

From the opening sequence: the Crawler delivering the
Saturn v rocket to the launch pad.

The second discovery was the original 30-track audio recordings of  the Apollo missions. At Mission Control in Houston all the various departments (CAPCOM, FIDO, Guidance, etc.) had their own audio circuit loops so the various members of each team could talk to each other. Other departments could punch into these loops as needed: a lot of the cool buttons on the Mission Control consoles are simply audio patch switches. These archive tape reels were digitized, corrected for various imperfections (the “wow and flutter” of the original audio made a lot of the voices on these tracks sound tremulous and nervous: now they just sound normal) and time-coded.

The Saturn V taking off, in 65mm Todd-AO.

These new resources went into Apollo 11— and the results are nothing short of magnificent. You have never seen Apollo-era NASA footage like this before: It's crystal-clear, with vibrant, unfaded color, looking like it was shot yesterday. The vividness is startling, out of context and impossible-feeling, as if someone found super8 home movies taken during the Battle of Gettysburg. The 65mm footage in concentrated in the beginning and end of the film, the launch and all the hubbub around it, and the carrier recovery and processing afterward. There was one Todd-AO camera set up less than a mile from the launch pad (on remote control, if they were smart) and the result is the most insanely detailed look at a Saturn V taking off ever seen. It puts the digital simulations of Apollo 13 (1995) and First Man (2018) to shame.

Johnny Carson, watching the launch from the VIP stands.
He is wearing a give-away paper baseball cap provided
courtesy of RCA. This was 1969: wearing hats went out with
john Kennedy, and only little boys went out in public
wearing baseball caps.

The 65mm camera operators covering the launch did something remarkable: they turned the cameras away from the NASA gear and into the crowds. Some of the best footage is of people milling around that hot morning in Florida, chatting, grabbing snacks, setting up cameras. Warm-weather casual fashion was on display everywhere: and what struck me is 100% of the adult men in attendance at Cape Kennedy or watching nearby wore shirts with buttons and collars. In 1969 T-shirts were underwear, or just for boys.

They let the 65mm camera into the Launch Control Center
at Kennedy, probably because all the windows would provide
enough light to get good shots. Mission Control in Houston
is windowless and all the footage is low-light 16mm.

The middle of the film relies mostly on older 16mm film archives, but the addition of the recovered 30-track audio elements adds something new: when we see Gene Krantz or Charlie Duke talking on those black headsets, the audio is in perfect sync. Before the new audio was available, filmmakers didn't even try to sync the audio.

Overall, it’s a tidy (93 minutes), Cinéma vérité style doc, long on reproducing the sights and sounds of the Apollo 11 mission with a minimum of explanation and no narration. If bringing the past back to life is the goal of any documentary, the startling new video and audio of Apollo 11 sets the highest standard I’ve ever seen.

Neil, Mike and Buzz, about to board the Airstream to the stars!

Any new documentary about American manned spaceflight is an exercise in somewhat wistful nostalgia: they document an era when we used to take on huge, improbable projects like this, apply the best minds on earth to the task, and make human history. There was a recent interview with a retired NASA official where he said that if the funding for space exploration had continued at the same pace as the Apollo program, humans would have landed on Mars by 1985. Alas.

Incubus: Malbenita Kulto Klasika

TCM screened a rarity last night-- a genuine cult classic for the rarified cults of indie horror, William Shatner, "The Outer Limits" and constructed languages: Incubus.

This 1966 film is set in an imaginary country and past and tells the story of a demonic cult of hot blondes-- a sort of succubus-in-training farm team-- who lure weak, corrupt men to the sea and drown them to hasten their souls to hell.  One member, Kai (Allyson Ames, the director's wife at the time), is tired of having to deal with douchebags who are already damned: she wants the thrill of ensnaring a clean, virtuous soul. Marc (William Shatner) embodies this goodness: a heroic soldier returning home to live with his sister Arndis (Ann Atmar).

Kia shows up at their house during an eclipse, tempts Marc away to the sea, intent on doing him in. But his goodness stops her (I guess) and they end up in a church, where she freaks out at all the holiness. Terrible things happen to Arndis: she goes blind and mute, she's kidnapped and raped. Eventually things get so out of hand an Incubus is invoked to help with Kia's goal, which she so miserably failed.  The Incubus (played with shirtless greasiness by Milos Milos) eventually gets into a Kirk-versus-Gorn wrestling match with Marc, and by the end everyone is dead or nearly so.

William Shatner and Allyson Ames. At one point in the film
he roughly grabs her by the shoulders and kisses the
heck out of her. That was widely identified as a classic
Captain Kirk move: this proves it was actually a
classic Shatner move.

Writer-director Leslie Stevens (the producer behind "The Outer Limits") manages to give the film a stark, spooky tone-- it reminded me strongly of some other supernatural classics of the era, Carnival of Souls (1962) and The Seventh Seal (1957). He was no doubt aided by one of the best DPs of the era, Conrad Hall, lensing his first feature film. Never a dull moment-- though there a lot of long, long sequences of actors walking through the countryside.

It's worth a look for several interesting reasons:

• The movie-- dialog and credits-- is entirely in Esperanto, an international common language invented by a Russian ophthalmologist in the 1890s. It's a bold experiment, aided by the film's rather simplified universe of dichotomies (man/woman, good/evil, dark/light, etc.) If it's a gimmick, it's a good one: Make an instant Foreign Film!

The Esperanto dialog-- aided by huge, hideous, black-blocked subtitles-- is remarkably easy to follow. The language is a sort of mash-up of Romance, Slavic and Germanic language forms, so it sounds startlingly familiar. Apparently, those with a better ear for Esperanto than I say that Shatner gives his line readings a French accent, which may have something to do with his Montreal upbringing.

Mission San Antonio. It looks just a rough now
as it did in 1966, and probably 1771.

• Incubus was filmed in my old backyard: Monterey County. Scenes take place on the coast at Big Sur, Carmel Valley and the back-country around Fort Hunter Liggett. The church in the film is Mission San Antonio de Padua-- a California mission in the middle of nowhere, take my word for it. The rugged beauty of the locations shines through the murky condition of the only remaining print (more below).

• Apparently a wandering hippie, unhappy with the rude way the Incubus film crew treated him, placed a curse on the production. If you are one to believe in such things as Hippie Curses, it was a quite effective-- if wildly uneven-- hex.

The film was released into the international festival circuit to generally positive acclaim. However, within a year: A) Milos Milos killed his wife, then himself; B) Ann Atmar committed suicide; C) Allyson Ames divorced Leslie Stevens; D) The film lab accidentally destroyed the master negative and most of the prints. Stevens, upset from the tragedies surrounding his film, withdrew it from release.

On the upside of this "curse," within the same year: A) William Shatner would land his iconic role as Captain Kirk on "Star Trek;" B) DP Conrad Hall would be nominated for an Academy Award (Morituri), then two more times in a row (The Professionals in 1966, In Cold Blood in 1967) , lens Harper and Cool Hand Luke, and win the Oscar in 1969 (For Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)

Such is the simple dichotomy of Incubus, a cursed/not cursed cult classic.

The Fever Dream That Was Casino Royale

Peter Sellers as Evelyn Tremble/James Bond 007. He was by far the most
charismatic actor in Casino Royale, so it's a shame he didn't shoot his
entire role. In this scene he is playing Baccarat with Le Chiffre
(Orson Welles), despite the fact they were never on the set at the same time.

I do not believe I have ever before seen the 1967 version of Casino Royale all the way through. That is, I thought I did not see this film until I watched it last night in pretty HD. Then I realized I had seen it, probably several times: it was such a mess of a film that my young mind probably couldn't coherently file it away. So this movie somehow fooled me into thinking I never saw it.

And now I know why.

Like I said, Casino Royale (which Daniel adores, for many reasons now very obvious) is a mess of a film-- a glorious tribute to the excesses of producers who believe they have such a hot property that, like a hyperactive dog with a soup bone, they don't know what to do with it. The hot property here was the film rights to "Casino Royale," the first Ian Fleming 007 novel from 1953. These rights eluded Cubby Broccoli and EON Productions, ending up in the hands of Charles K. Feldman and Columbia Pictures.

Woody Allen as Jimmy Bond / Mr. Noah. I'm guessing Charles Feldman
Owed him a solid for writing What's New, Pussycat? and gave him the
juicy Villain role. He was not as funny as you'd expect in this film.

What do you DO with a legally usable character of such as James Bond, Agent 007, in the absolute height of his popularity? Feldman couldn't compete with Cubby Broccoli in terms of making a straight action film. So he made a spoof out of it. And boy, did he lay it on thick. You don't get one James Bond here: you get at least six. Every girl in the film is a Bond Girl (or will eventually be). It's a work of reactionary cinema: almost every scene refers in some way to the main Bond series.

And, like I said, it's a mess. There were six directors and even more screenwriters. Peter Sellers walked off the production, leaving huge holes of missing footage. Orson Welles insisted on doing magic tricks in his scenes. In the end, the filmmakers got so desperate they literally hung the numbers "007" on everything: seals, monkeys and on a plane full of awful Native American stereotypes (who parachute while saying "Geronimo!" Get it?)

Joanna Pettet as Mata Bond. She was a very pleasant surprise: exeedingly
beautiful and quite funny, the best Bond Girl in the film. Yes,
Ursula Andress was also in Casino Royale, but she's a dud:
thanks to HD, It's plain Ursula read her dialog off dummy cards.

All this being said and well-documented (really, this is one of those films where the making of is more interesting than the film itself), I'd have to say it is still a very funny, very unusual film. If you were looking for insight into the mid-1960s, particularly into the slim moment in history when the early 60s James Bond Space Age aesthetic was about to be eclipsed by the psychedelic, Op Art late 60s, this is the touchstone.

The jumpy, scattered storyline is in some ways ahead of its time. Movies of this era were often plodding and linear: it took breakthroughs like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider to move Hollywood cinema to a more punctuated style of narrative. In Casino Royale this evolution happened accidentally: The very effort to salvage this movie -- missing stars, unshot footage, plainly overindulgent style-- into releasable form created a weird dreamlike flow to the story. This interpretation makes quite a bit of sense: If you were dreaming about, say, James Bond, and his appearance shifts from David Niven to Terence Cooper to Peter Sellers, that would seem to the dreamer as a perfectly normal development. Locations shift nonsensically: characters are carefully established, disappear, then re-appear: To the dreamer, none of this seems out of place. So now you know why I didn't remember seeing this film as a kid: can anyone really remember dreams?

It's about as insane as any Terence Malick or David Lynch movie, but much funnier.

Kubrick at LACMA

I managed to rush down to Los Angeles to visit the Stanley Kubrick exhibit at the L.A. County Museum of Art before it closed at the end of the month. It was a bit of a pain to get everything to work out on short notice, but the payoff far outweighed the cost.

The Kubrick exhibit takes up the first floor of the Art of The Americas hall, and is arranged like all good museum retrospectives: chronologically, starting with an overview, a short visit to his earlier works, and on chronologically through his highly singular ouvre to Warsaw Diaries, a project he was just in the early stages of researching when he died.

There are a few situational ironies about this exhibit. Stanley Kubrick only shot one film in California: The Killing (1956), his second feature-- and most of that was filmed in the Bay Area, around the former Bay Meadows racetrack in San Mateo. He scrupulously avoided spending time in Hollywood. Los Angeles put on quite a tribute for an outlander-- but then again, it's all one big business. The money that financed his films flowed for the most part out of studio gates. If he was not one of Hollywood's own, then he is widely considered one.

What I found especially pleasing is how hard the curators strove for authenticity in all the sections: there are very few reproductions, aside from amazingly detailed ones, like the model maze from The Shining or the hanging 10-foot model of Discovery One. But Jack Torrance's typewriter and axes, Private Joker's helmet, Barry Lyndon's costume: all the genuine deal. Someone had reproduced the sexy milk-dispensing mannikins from A Clockwork Orange, which struck me as an odd thing to do.

I was very gratified to see that the part of the exhibit concerning 2001: A Space Odyssey was by far the largest in space and number of artifacts. I had read in Piers Bizony's excellent, definitive book 2001: Filming The Future that Kubrick had deliberately destroyed the sets, props, spaceship models and costumes after wrapping 2001 to keep them from being used in cheesy sci-fi films afterward. (This happened to George Pal's Forbidden Planet (1956): those crazy grey jumpsuits showed up on TV shows well into the 1960s, as did Robbie the Robot). I was amazed even a little of it survived.

We visited LACMA on a Friday: there was a comfortable amount of other visitors there, no real crowding. Therefore, I was able to take as much time as I wanted in the Kubrick exhibit. I circled around and took it all in again.

It was an incredible culmuination for me. It was nothing short of awe-inspiring to be in the presence of the artifacts of Kubrick's works. It allowed me to slip through the gossamer veil of the cinema screen: while you're in there, among the hand-written script notes and props and lenses, you're on Kubrick's side of the camera. You stand with Kubrick, see what he saw and wrote and imagined. A powerful, unforgettable experience.

If you missed this retrospective, feel free to kick yourself.

Outside the exhibit space.

A dark room just inside the entrance. It shows side-by-side clips from his films,
one side overlaid with pithy quotes. This goes a long way to show the
breathtaking span of Kubrick's auteur vision.

This is on the wall just past the main entrance. It makes no sense here.
Makes all kinds of sense once you've gone through the exhibit.

Stuart Freeborn's articulated
Australopithicus makeup.

Part of the 2001 exhibit. The Discovery model is a reproduction: the
Space Station 5 chairs are authentic.

Fairchild-Curtis fisheye lens-- This is HAL's eye, the one they used
in close-ups and as a filming lens for HAL's POV.

They displayed the HAL Lens behind glass, but on both sides. All you have to do
is point your camera up to the back and you could shoot right through it.
This is a picture of me as HAL would have seen it, taken straight through
the Fairchild lens. Just amazing.

An actual production Discovery space helmet. This was Dave Bowman's: He wore it on the first EVA to replace the "faulty"
AE-35 unit, and unfortunately forgot it later on. I stared at this for at least ten minutes: I never, ever thought I'd
see something like this in person.

A detail from a surviving spacesuit costume, one of
the silver ones worn on the Moon. This is the
data pad, and there is supposed to be a number
of buttons on it. They must have fallen out.

There was other stuff there too: Here is Private Joker's helmet from
Full Metal Jacket. His gold wire-frame glasses were on display just
below as well.

All work and no going to LA to see a once-in-a-lifetime
museum retrospective make Jack a dull boy. The actual prop
Adler typewriter from The Shining.

The Wide, Wide West

It takes a good reason to get someone to drive 325 miles to see a movie. But if the reason is site-specific AND rare, you gotta make the trip. And so I attended the final days of the 60th Anniversary of Cinerama festival in Hollywood at the Pacific Cinerama Dome, one of only three theaters left in the world equipped to show the process.

The festival closed with a screening of How The West Was Won (1962), a star-studded* epic depicting 50s-era "manifest destiny," the American expansion west. It was one of only two narratives shot in Cinerama, a widescreen visual process that utilizes three strips of film set at angles that give a startling 146° angle of view. It was specifically designed to be shown on a deeply curved screen, which rectifies the wide angle of the collective image in an equally startling way. So when you watch a Cinerama movie the perspective seems amazingly natural, and you follow the action by turning your head, like you would in the real world. Conceptually, it's uncanny.

Practically, however, there are some strange limitations to the process. The seams between the triptych panels are never invisible: the optics of the time (Cinerama cameras were built in the early 1950s) couldn't make the edges blend perfectly. In How The West Was Won the filmmakers took great pains to hide the seams: they would position the actors so they were center in each lens, and often buildings or trees would coincide with the frame edges. One sequence near the end takes place in the interior of a house in Arizona: the wallpaper was a combination of little flowers, grey vertical stripes, and more grey vertical stripes. The frame edges were lost in a sea of stripes: Cinerama wallpaper.

An idea of just how wide the image is-- a frame from
HTWWW, probably a CinemaScope reduction print.
The seams are plainly visible, and you can see that each strip
is actually a tall rectangle.

Ultimately, the Cinerama process is so singular and unusual that it holds the narrative hostage. Since the cameras had only one set of lenses, close-ups were impossible. Medium shots were achieved by having the actors stand less than two feet from the camera, and even then the vastness of the settings dominated the frame. The overarching problem is the style of storytelling employed by the directors (yes, there were four directors): These old Hollywood pros came up in the Academy Format days, and it is obvious they were in their comfort zone with a single focus of action in each scene. An actor will talk: the other actors will look on blankly, as if they thought they were out of frame. So there is a lot of standing around and listening with the cast of this film. Even the wide-screen action sequences tend to have a stubbornly singular core of interest (be it a spectacular train wreck or a spectacular buffalo stampede). This center-of-frame emphasis tends to deaden the compositions, as richly designed as the sets were or amazing the location: They became just so much scenery.

(According to some commie social commentary I've read, regarding nature as "scenery" is a hallmark of bourgeois capitalism, the first step to the commodification of natural resources. That idea fits well here.)

Some folks have released HTWWW in "smilebox" format,
with a curvature added digitally.
This is how a medium shot works in Cinerama.

It took a new generation of filmmakers and a change in visual narrative language to get widescreen cinema to work more naturally. Mise en scene narrative, which uses the entirety of the cinematic canvas, sometimes in multiple centers of action over a widescreen frame, was just being defined at the time HTWWW was released. It would take visionary filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Jaques Tati and Blake Edwards to really open up the widescreen frame to it's unique storytelling potential.

With all of it's faults, HTWWW and Cinerama is still a marvel to behold. This film just does not work on video, HD or not: it does not even work in 'scope on a movie screen. It specifically designed for one and only one projection process, and I consider myself fortunate to have see it in it's proper grandeur.

*I picked out Harry Dean Stanton in an uncredited bit part as one of Eli Wallach's henchmen. How old IS that guy?

E=M4w

The weird thing is, I'm usually a minimalist.

Seriously, my inclination in entertainment is to try to acheive as much as possible with the least amount of money. I'm a sucker for Roger Corman movies, and have always been very fond of a story he tells about the day he was shooting a Greek war epic. He had scheduled 100 extras in togas and only 20 showed up. Rather than try to round up more extras he added a line of dialogue about how one Greek has the fighting power of five men.

And this is why it's odd that I've always been such a fan of It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, the Stanley Kramer comedy epic. To me the words "epic" and "comedy" just do not belong together. Still, I grew up watching it on TV (okay, given the Ultra-Panavision aspect ratio of the movie, I watched the middle of it) and loved it.

If you're not familiar, M4W is a kind of caper film. 4 carloads of strangers witness a car crash on a desert road. The driver (Jimmy Durante) tells them of a hidden fortune buried in a park "under a big W" just before he dies. At first the assembled group determines to find the money and split it, but soon it becomes an every-man-for-himself race to get the cash first. The cast is a who's who of comic actors including Sid Ceaser, Milton Berle, Johnathan Winters, Terry Thomas, Mickey Rooney, Ethel Merman and Buddy Hackett. And honest, that's just scratching the surface.

About twenty years ago the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood promised a widescreen presentation of it and I excitedly bought my ticket for it, only to realize that they had failed to secure a widescreen print. In fact, it was a television print from a TV station down the street; not only were the sides cut off for TV, the top and bottom were cut off so it would fit on the theatre screen. I have resented this experience ever since, until Wednesday night.

Because it was then that the Dome finally made good on that promise and presented the film in its original format, 70mm, 7 track AND anamorphically stretched on a screen so curved that reality itself looked weird for a couple of hours afterward. And let me tell you, no matter how many times you've seen this movie on TV, it's an entirely different experience.

M4W is a movie where plans fail spectacularly. A flat tire doesn't just slow you down - it ends with an entire service station in ruins. Sid Ceaser and his wife get locked in a basement and ultimately the only way out is to use dynamite and escape through a Chinese Laundry. The gags all have BIG payoffs. And in most cases they're a little too big for that box in your living room. The very hugeness of Ultra Panavision is half the payoff for these jokes. It's funny when that gas station is dismantled; but it's HILARIOUS when you're sitting in a theatre and it's as big as an actual gas station.

Oddly, Berle and Ceasar are the comedy superstars who come off as almost straight-men in this movie. My theory is that they were sketch comics - they were at their best displaying their versatility in short bursts, and here they're sustaining a character for over 3 hours. They're really good at it too, but they don't shine like Phil Silvers (playing Bilko again, but in a suit) or Terry Thomas. These are guys who worked a single persona for years into a fine glossy gem.

It's probably the greatest acheivement imagineable when you can take something as delicate an fragile as comedy, throw an impossible amount of money at it, and still get laughs. Usually it doesn't work and you just wind up with an expensive question mark of an experience. Here, it's magical.

The Trek-O-Meter is back!

Hey-- I found a bunch of Podcast episodes backed up on the Internet Archive! Now I can repost some of the better articles-- like this one! --Skot

Jack B. Sowards died on July 8th 2007. His obit mentions he is most notable for having written Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, still considered the finest ST movie made. This brought something back into full recollection, something in need of a fitting send-off as well.

About a dozen years ago, some friends and I cobbled together a handy system for measuring the intensity of a person’s Star Trek fandom with a simple-to-use linear meter. This system of measurement served us very well (”Eddie– Check out the eight in line over there!”) during the incredible glut of franchise content available from the early 90s to just a few years ago. Here it is– and please, feel free to grade yourself:

10.0 - The perfect score was defined in a TV Guide Star Trek Commemorative magazine in 1995. In an article about serious fandom (Klingon language camp, costumed convention-goers, etc.) was a piece about a young man who built a replica of the Enterprise bridge set in his mother’s basement– and would act out his own Star Trek adventures in it. Think about that for a moment. Ponder the sheer force of will behind doing such a thing. Consider the circumstances. This pegs the meter: It cannot be surpassed. Even the people who designed and built the ACTUAL sets for Star Trek cannot meet this score– They were PAID to do their work.

9.0 - People who owned Trek costumes and attended conventions regularly. Fluent in Klingon. Have met Walter Koenig. Bjo Trimble was a 9.

8.0 - People who have seriously followed the shows, did not have any strong criticisms of “Star Trek: Enterprise” and first-nighted the movies. People who knew who Bjo Trimble was.

7.0 - Attended a few conventions, saw all the movies, but could not cite chapter and verse from any series but their favorite. Would not like being called a “Trekkie,” preferring “Trekfan.”

6.0 -Wouldn’t be particularly put out to be called a “Trekkie.”



5.0 - The great median. Knew and appreciated the franchise as a whole, but generally followed the herd.

4.0 - Thought Seven of Nine was hot, but found “Voyager” boring; Thought T’Pol was hot, but found “Enterprise” boring. Liked the effects in the movies. Thought “Live Long and Prosper” was the slogan of a medical group.

3.0 - Thought a “Gorn” was a sort of melon. Often confused “Babylon 5″ with “Deep Space 9.”

2.0 - Watched “Next Generation” as a kid. Saw First Contact on cable a few years back, liked it.

1.0 - Liked Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but that’s just about it.

0.0 - The bottom peg of the meter was defined by my dear departed dad, who was vaguely aware there was a show on TV called “Star Track” and it had something to do with Dr. Spock.

A few notes: Most normal people would not stick to one point on the meter for any length of time: Some 3s would shoot up into 7 or 8 territory during a ST movie premiere or series season finale. And most significantly, this is a linear scale– it measures x, intensity of fandom. The unmeasured y dimension is sanity. The scale assumes full sanity: Nutcases (Shatner-stalkers and that juror who wore a Starfleet uniform to the Whitewater grand jury in ‘96) can theoretically exceed 10, but they tend to take right turns and fall off the chart entirely. (Special props: Chris, for helping with the chart definitions)

The Star Trek franchise has run its course: the props and costumes are being auctioned off, and there are no serious plans for new content. It still feels a bit strange to live in a world without it. It’s been around in one form or another since 1966, about as long as I have: It was not difficult to assume the portal to the Star Trek universe would remain open forever.

Even the kid with the bridge set in his mom’s basement has probably dismantled it long ago and moved on. I wouldn’t put money on it, mind you, but probably.

And then there's THIS article from 2008! --s

The ol’ Trek-o-Meter, that linear scale used to track the intensity of one’s Star Trek fandom essayed in these pages last July, apparently isn’t quite ready to be retired yet. For one thing, there is finally a new original-series-characters Star Trek movie in production, with Chris Pine (Smokin’ Aces) as Kirk and Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) as Scotty. this film was set to be released in December 2008: the WGA strike bumped it to early Summer 2009.

I’m bringing this up because there are a few new distinctions to add to the Trek-o-Meter, based on some recent real-life encounters that have been reported indirectly to, and later confirmed by, Box Office Weekly.

1. A fellow of tertiary acquaintance was found to have not one, but several Star Trek tattoos on his body. Fandom-based body modification needs to be quantified for the Meter (and remember: zero is ‘completely unaware’ and 10 is ‘Enterprise set in mom’s basement’):

Anyone with one Star Trek tattoo: automatic 7.5.

Anyone with several Star Trek tattoos: automatic 8.5.

Anyone with tattooed inscriptions in Klingon script which needs to be translated for curious witnesses: automatic 9.5.

Subtraction: I once met a drummer with a punk band who had the Star Trek emblem tattooed on his chest. His nickname was “Trek,” and he performed shirtless. He gets a point taken off for the irony and coolness factors.

2. A good friend of mine (who is fairly indifferent to Star Trek: I’d call her a 3.0) once had a date (a real date, a dinner-and-a-movie type date) with a young man who wore a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” uniform shirt for the occasion. Complete with communicator badge. And he would, once in awhile, talk into the communicator badge.

That’s right: he wore a Starfleet uniform on a first date. Needless to say, there wasn’t a second date. (My friend said he “had a lot of other issues… Weird issues.”)

This is a good example of someone hitting that hard-to-attain perfect 10.0, but the “other issues” mentioned are telling. He was obviously right in the middle of making that hard right turn, departing from the quantifiable plain of intrinsic reality.

Live Long and Prosper.

Eyes Without A Face (Not the Billy Idol Song)

Got a chance to watch this, last night-- part of a slate of TCM classic films picked by, of all people, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain. Apparently one of his favorite films was this one, a French horror film (Les yeux sans visage) from 1960.

Le plot: Docteur Génessier, a brilliant surgeon, has a daughter who had her face blown off in a car accident that was his fault. Not just some facial scarring: we assume she does not have any face at all because she is forced to wear a creepy-looking mask. His assistant Louise kidnaps fair, blue-eyed girls from Paris (out of gratitude: some time in the past he fixed her face), takes them to his country estate where he chloroforms them, cuts their face off (they show this happening with unsettling detail) and grafts it onto his daughter. The grafts generally don't take, requiring more trips to Paris for Louise.

This goes on until the Gendarmes realize a lot of fair, blue-eyed Parisian girls have gone missing, and they convince Paulette, a petty shoplifter they have in custody, to be kidnapping bait in lieu of jail (I assume this sort of plea-deal is legal in France).

The end comes not by the Gendarmes catching Le Docteur Fou, but as things just go awry, Coen Brothers style: The cops delay the Docteur, the chloroform wears off, Paulette escapes, Louise tries to stop her-- and the faceless daughter stabs Louise to death. She then releases a lot of dogs from cages (he had 'em for grafting practice), they get out and chew Docteur Génessier's face off (the irony buzzer goes off) and the faceless daughter, a dove on her shoulder, wanders off into the woods. Fin, over the blare of the Irony Klaxon.

All this definitely qualifies Eyes Without a Face as a horror film. It was influenced by early Hammer films, which were very popular in France in the 1950s. Les yeux sans visage was eventually released in the United States-- after being dubbed, edited and retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. It came out on a double-bill with The Manster-- Another flawed classic.

A few thoughts:

• EWAF was directed by Georges Franjou, the co-founder of the Cinematheque Française, the world's first cinema archive. The influence of the films he archived--in particular German Expressionism-- is quite evident in some nice little bits of poetic film language added to the horror-film base, a cinematic roux. My favorite: Docteur Génessier is opening up a crypt in a cemetery to dispose of another dead girl's body. Louise stands guard. She hears a roaring sound. Thinking a car is coming, she looks around and sees nothing. But she looks up-- and sees a jet flying high overhead in the night sky. The shot lingers: the wingtip lights blink as it slowly crosses the frame. Then another shot of Louise-- just watching the plane. An ambiguous, introspective, beautiful moment plunked right in the heart of all the horror.

This is the best look we get of La Fille Sans Visage
in all her purposely out-of-focus glory.
The power of imagination-- or was 1960 effects makeup
technology not up to the task?

• This film could really, really stand a decent remake. it's got Remake Formula all over it: An intriguing idea, not applied fully and effectively. EWAF is the Frankenstein story, with a mad doctor using living people instead of corpses: this little change makes his violations personal (gimme your face, lady!) rather than theological (take that, God!). It has influenced quite a few other films-- Dr. Sardonicus (1962), Face/Off (1997) and countless lesser drive-in flicks. Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (2011) is close to a logical sequel-- after you add the his trademark insane family drama to the mix. And if you take EWAF, subtract the mad doctor's personal justification and bury the needle in terms of sheer nihilism, you get The Human Centipede.


• It's another film with a soundtrack that has not aged well. It was the second score by Maurice Jarre, who would go on to win an Oscar with his score for Lawrence of Arabia two years later, pretty much the only member of the EWAF cast or crew who would make a successful migration to Hollywood. For all the orchestral sweep of his scores (Dr. Zhivago, Witness, Ghost) with EWAF his musical contribution is stubbornly Gallic. Jarre created themes to his score: when the mad doctor's assistant would go out looking for fair mademoiselles to carve up, the soundtrack would blare something that sounded like a bistro quintet with a triple-time "umm-PA-PA" meter. It's almost exactly like the theme song of "The Larry David Show." Distracting.

• Courtesy of the IMDb and Hulu, you can actually watch the entire thing free!

Jon Versus Kim, Smart TV versus Stupid TV

There is a fascinating exchange going on via the entertainment news, one that speaks volumes to the cultural conflicts raging through television and, by implication, the larger world. It's a war of words in a fight that is measuring the very viability of intelligence in public media.

It all started last week, when handsome, handsome actor Jon Hamm talked to Elle (UK) about the sad decline of public culture:

We’re at a place where the idea of being elite is somehow considered a negative. Whether it’s Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian or whoever, stupidity is certainly celebrated. Being a fucking idiot is a valuable commodity in this culture because you’re rewarded significantly. Incuriousness has become cool... It's celebrated. It doesn't make sense to me.

This is what I consider a lovely bit of portable wisdom. It ties in the latest trend in FNC/RNC name-calling (in 2012, "elite" is a GOP obscene epithet, even though the candidates could objectively be called nothing else) with the depths of reality TV, where there is nothing more telegenic and ratings-grabbing than the combination of wealthy people acting like total fools.

The point Mr. Hamm was making was quite clear-- but in doing so he also made a huge tactical blunder: he mentioned Kim Kardashian by name in public. There is no opportunity for public exposure too insignificant or obtuse for her to pursue. So of course, she weighed right in (via Twitter, which is about as thoughtful a medium as she uses):

I just heard about the comment Jon Hamm made about me in an interview. I respect Jon and I am a firm believer that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that not everyone takes the same path in life. We're all working hard and we all have to respect one another. Calling someone who runs their own businesses, is a part of a successful TV show, produces, writes, designs, and creates, "stupid," is in my opinion careless.

At this point, you could step back and call this whole thing entirely superfluous-- the opinion of an actor being rebutted publicly by a… by a… I guess you could call her a reality-television personality. Anyway, some might see the antics of the Kardashians are harmless entertainment put out by people willing to make their private lives public in lieu of something that requires actual talent.

(I'm obviously taking Jon Hamm's side here-- especially when Kim claims to be someone who "produces, writes, designs, and creates." There are all sorts of levels of that kind of thing, and her level of reality-TV creativity is risible. The only creative guy in reality TV is that keyboard guy who puts the cymbal crashes on all the bug-eyed revelatory shots-- and, steady paycheck or not, the poor bugger probably contemplates suicide on a weekly basis.)

But that's not what this publicly conducted argument is actually about-- this is the inside view of an epic fight: The Battle for Television's Soul. On one side is scripted television: written and created by studio-level artisans and professionals, expertly produced, expensive and risky. On the other side is reality television: created by pandering cable-level producers, shot on the fly and cheaply, calculated to sensationalize the lives of the privileged and stupid. On basic cable, Reality TV tends to outdraw scripted shows: on the big nets, it's pretty much 50/50, "American Idol" and it's ilk versus everything else.

"Mad Men" is the standard-bearer for Smart TV:  Crazy melodrama aside, It takes great pains to recreate the world of the 1960s and explore the societal and cultural changes under way in that era. Watching it is often a history lesson, and we can glean much about how modern society was shaped by the larger conflicts raging in the subtext of every episode. Jon Hamm is the star of that show, and it's obvious to any viewer that the cool intelligence of Don Draper flows from him organically.

"Keeping Up with the Kardashians" and all the other grubby little satellite shows in it's orbit are, of course, the apex of Stupid TV, escapist, disposable entertainment. The intricacies of the human condition are indeed on display on Kardashian-centered entertainment, but in a debased form: envy, backbiting, awe in it's trashy McMansion splendor, and petty conflict. If it has any redeeming social value, it must be at such an ultra-sonic level of irony it's only understood by ironic dogs.

These shows often out-draw "Mad Men" in ratings. This is what motivated Jon Hamm to speak out: he and his show are on the parapets of traditional Hollywood, watching the hoard of Kardashians and Snookies and Real Housewives coming right at them. Notching an arrow in the bow and and letting fly is preferable to being overrun.

Jon Hamm did, in time, realize his tactical blunder, and via "Inside Hollywood" issued a response to Ms. Kardashian's barbed tweet. Don't call it an apology-- He's not about letting Reality TV off the hook anytime soon:

It’s surprising to me that it has become remotely a story… My quote was simply about that version of television and that version of American culture being celebrated. It’s not something that I particularly enjoy. The quote was obviously taken out of context, but I said what I said. I just wish it had been reported correctly. I don’t know Ms. Kardashian; I’ve never met her (and) I would never say anything personally about somebody that I’ve not met. What I said was meant to be more on pervasiveness of something in our culture, not personal, but she took offense to it and that is her right.

I'm sure it'll end here-- Too many big words for Kim to possibly match.

ADDENDA: Kim may be done, but apparently her proxies want to get in on this ginned-up "feud." Ms. Kardashian's best friend Jonathan Cheban has gone on the record with this reposte: "Jon Hamm just needs to shut up and stop being such a mad man." Um... zing, I guess.

Matango: The Brady Bunch Connection

The sexy, sexy Italian one-sheet for Matango.

 This is the other old TPN post worthy of rescue (and re-editing).

In this article we're  going to discover why "The Brady Bunch" owes so much to Godzilla.

I had the pleasure of watching a Netflix DVD loaned to me by Chris, my business partner: Matango (1963). It was known in the US as Attack of the Mushroom People. It scared the living crap out me when I was a wee lad watching  "Chiller Diller Matinee" on Channel 44. Remarkable to see this film fresh and uncut, in 2.35:1 TohoScope, bright Fujicolor and subtitled Japanese. The channel 44 version was the one we ALL saw as kids: A heavily edited, clumsily dubbed, 16mm pan-and-scan print, run through a (no doubt) crummy film chain-- it was so washed out my recollections if it are in black and white.

This film was directed by Ishiro Honda, The Kaiji Eiga (Giant Monster Movie) master who directed Godzilla, Rodan and countless others. Matango is an unusual Honda film, an atmospheric horror movie with people-sized monsters.

Well, of course there's a range of Japanese action figures
available for Matango! The monsters depicted here
are much cuter than in the film.

The things that scared the piss out of me as a kid are still there: the ghastly, faceless mushroom people, the distorted laughter on the soundtrack, the air of gloom and slow death. Justifiably a cult classic.

A have heard all effective horror films play on primal phobias: violence, heights, enclosed spaces. (Daniel's brother Ed once surmised that if someone could realize a fortune if they make a horror film exploiting the number one fear in America: Public Speaking.) Matango works as a horror flick on several levels:

• The scary, lumbering mushroom folk, they're pretty scary in a monster-movie sort of way.

• The fact these fungal folks were once people and the characters are going to turn into them unless they can escape plays into fears of loss of humanity and Self.

• Matango plays on fears of germs and filth and disease. The island the principals are marooned on is lush and tropical: the abandoned ship they take up residence in is covered with mold, dry rot and fungus. They manage to clean it, but the mold soon returns. For the fastidiously clean Japanese audience the film was designed for, the creeping corruption and rot must have been harder to take than the prospect of turning into an ambulatory shiitake.

This film was based on "The Voice in the Night," a short story published in 1907 by pioneering English sci-fi author William Hope Hodgson. Conversely, it has long been rumored that Matango was an inspiration for "Gilligan's Island," that iconic, unlikely comedy series from the 1960s.

Exhibit A: Cast of Matango. Left to right: "Writer," Bombshell,
Chaste Young Girl, Skipper, Rich Guy, First Mate and Professor.
Note the First Mate has a red shirt, as did Gilligan.

After a careful comparison of the two works, allow me to lay such rumors to rest: It was. TV Producer Sherwood Schwartz (who also created "The Brady Bunch") had a motive, opportunity and even tacit permission to swipe the basic premise of Honda's film.

The basic story common to both movie and TV show involves seven people from various walks of life on a short pleasure cruise. They get caught in a storm, marooning them on a deserted tropical island. Schwartz basically took this first half-hour of Matango and pitched it to the network, adding "and then hilarity ensues!" He left off the rising themes of violence, greed, lust, starvation, and death that drives the latter hour of Matango, replacing these with coconut shortwave radios and funny guest stars.

Exhibit B: flashback scene. The dialog in subtitles is that
of the "writer," explaining why his manuscript (on
the table) seems so derivative.

But the cast of "Gilligan's Island" is almost entirely present in Matango: Skipper, First Mate, Professor, Chaste Young Girl, Glamorous Bombshell, Rich Guy. He made one cast change, and a very telling one: Instead of Mrs. Rich Guy ("Lovey" Howell), the seventh castaway in Matango is a writer. He's the first character to, when things begin to get desperate, steal food from the others, and the first to eat the fateful mushrooms. He's a morally weak character who, in a flashback scene, plainly admits to plagiarism.

Puzzling evidence.








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