More Media Funhouse full episodes on the Net, free!

The Funhouse TV show will celebrate its 30th anniversary on Sept. 30 of this year. Besides making me feel incredibly old, the fact that I’m still doing the Funhouse after all this time does make me proud. I’m proud that I’ve kept the show going despite obstacles too numerous to mention, proud that I’ve gotten to cover a broad spectrum of both high art and low trash (something you can’t do in mainstream media — it’s one or the other, and neither makes $), and proud that I’ve been able to share it all with the Manhattan cable viewers of the show, those who read the associated writing I’ve done (both on this blog and in my DVD/BD reviews), and those who watch the show virtually on the MNN stream each late Saturday night. 

So, I felt it was time to put a few more shows up online in their entirety. This can’t be done on YouTube, which arbitrarily enforces copyright, bashes to death the notion of “fair use” and critical context, and deals harshly with those who ain’t payin’ them. As for popular categories of “fair use” YT vids, I never wanted to talk through or “shrink” into a tiny box the clips I show on the program; I don’t think me “reacting” to things is interesting — I introduce the material and then let ’er rip! 

This time it’s a quartet of recently produced shows, two of which fit snugly into the “high art” category, one of which is surely “low trash,” and a fourth that is simply a great Golden Age film that deserves a bigger audience. 

The last-mentioned is the first show I posted. On this episode, I discuss and show clips from the 1937 British thriller Love from a Stranger. I will readily admit that the reason I encountered this particular thriller (which I hadn’t heard of until recently) was because I had finally obtained the long out-of-print (and often wildly overpriced) book The Wild Wild World of the Cramps by Ian Johnston. 

In the book, which supposedly the Cramps were not fond of (a shame, because it’s the best of the two books written about them and is quite reverent and informative), there is a section from an interview in which the late lamented Lux Interior provides a list of films he really loves. The Cramps’ deep love for both Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis was mentioned in many of their interviews (and they sang theme songs from films by both men), but this longer list was interesting, in that it mostly seemed to have items that were put out by two public domain video labels of the time. 

Thus, it seemed to me to be a list of Lux’s recent purchases — many of the movies were just standard-issue horror and juvenile delinquent flicks. The list, started out, though, with the masterwork of frenzy that is The World’s Greatest Sinner by Timothy Carey. 

Lux also included Love from a Stranger in his list. Here is the entry: 

“Lux: It’s a great old movie and stars Basil Rathbone as a serial killer. 

Ivy: He plays a psychotic! 

Lux: Basil Rathbone in his most demanding performance (laughs) and I ain’t kidding. He starts off as being really suave, sweeps this girl off her feet and tells her he’s rich. As the movie goes on he becomes more and more nutty and in the last half hour of the film she realizes the man she’s married to is a full-blown psychotic. She’s alone with him in this house in the middle of nowhere and he plans to kill her. He becomes more disheveled throughout. They’ll be sitting eating dinner and he’ll suddenly turn round to her and say, ‘WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!’ He shovels tons of food into his mouth and it all starts dribbling down his chin and then he burps, loudly… this is Basil Rathbone! He turns into a monster. 

Ivy: He just turns into a monster without make-up. The performances are excellent.” 

The only things I can add to this lively description is that the film was scripted by the leading woman screenwriter of the time, Frances Marion (who wrote Dinner at Eight), and was based on a short story by Agatha Christie. It does have some really good twists and turns, and does feature a truly manic turn by the future Sherlock Holmes (aka Wolf von Frankenstein). 

 

Another title mentioned in a different list of movies recommended by Senor Interior (in the 1986 tour booklet that contained list of faves from all four members of the band) is Confessions of a Psycho Cat (1968). This film was part of a major rediscovery (thanks to the great producer Dave Friedman letting one mail-order firm know about a trove of 16mm copies of pretty much forgotten titles) of sexploitation titles, and it is well worth a look. Lux liked it SO much that he wrote a song with the same title. 

The 9,000th version of the “Most Dangerous Game” scenario (in which humans are the prey that is hunted, not animals), this one features an insane female hunter pursuing three down-and-out figures on the streets of NYC: a washed-up actor, a junkie beatnik, and a former wrestling “champeen,” played by none other than Da Bull himself, Jake LaMotta (who really trades on that nickname here, being killed in a mock bullfight by the hunter, dressed to the nines in a torera outfit). It’s a quite amazingly nuts film and worthy of a full Funhouse episode. 

 

Time to flip the equation and move to the “high art” side of the film world. This is represented by a pair of episodes paying tribute to one of the biggest heroes in the Funhouse, namely Uncle Jean, aka Jean-Luc Godard. After his death, I knew I would have to look long and hard through his work and assemble a series of episodes paying tribute to his work, era by era. So far, I’ve assembled and aired two of these shows, and one episode discussing and excerpting scenes from A Vendredi Robinson, the 2022 Mitra Farahani film that offers us a last sustained look at JLG in his natural habitat (filmed in 2014-15 before he was gravely affected by a neurological condition). 

The first show covers the first six years of his most famous period, the Sixties, from 1960 to ’65. I discuss a few of the tenets of his work, display a few of the many magazines and books devoted to him, and then show scenes from nine of his first 10 features. (Including some that are truly iconic — and ripped off to no end — and some that show off specific aspects of his work.)

 

The second episode completes the overview of Godard Sixties features. (I’ll approach the anthology contributions, shorts, and the missing ’60s feature in a future episode.) Here I open with some more books/magazines and an anecdote illustrating what it was like seeing Godard’s most obscure work in a certain Manhattan museum.

From that point I move on to the period in his work that opened the way for an incredible amount of radically unusual films in the late Sixties/early Seventies. We move from his last classically “New Wave” film (MASCULIN FEMININ) to his post-“end of cinema” features in 1968. 

 

I plan to only put up a select few episodes online. (There have been over a thousand new shows in the 30 years we’ve been on the air.) The only way to see the show regularly for those outside of Manhattan is to catch it late Sat/early Sunday at 1:00 a.m. EST on the MNN stream on Ch. 3, the “Spirit Channel.”

Media Funhouse episodes on the Net

Back in August, just as the Media Funhouse TV show was about to enter its 30th year on the air (the show debuted on September 30, 1993), the cable access organization that airs the show, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, moved its HQ from 59th Street and 11th Ave. to 38th Street and 11th Avenue. At this point the live streams of MNN channels went dark and a third party organization began airing their shows — in a bizarre twist, the Standard Definition shows began airing in HD (and within an odd onscreen pattern of a letterbox-within-a-windowbox).

The last-mentioned aspect (and many other daily grinds) has kept me so busy that only now — now in a week when the live streams are in fact BACK ON-AIR (!) — have I had the chance to find a suitable “platform” to host a Media Funhouse online “channel” of the recent episodes that no one outside of Manhattan could see. (I take my viewership outside the borough as seriously as the ones inside the borough.) OK.ru is the site of choice, since Vimeo demands cold hard cash for every bit of space it allots a videomaker, the workings of DailyMotion are a puzzle, and YouTube has various wondrous stumbling blocks — most of them “international bans” — in place for those who create video montages.

OK.ru is the “YouTube of Russia.” To those who might think that “I’ll be *watched* if I go to that site!” I have a fast newsflash: You’re being watched on YouTube. You’re being watched (especially!) on Facebook. Your social media is being registered and logged everywhere at every time. Unless you go “off the grid” entirely, as long as you have an active presence online, you’re being watched. From your desktop computer, your work computer (again, especially), and most definitely your tablet and phone, you’re being watched. (And I've "unlocked" the embeds from ok.ru below, so you can click them and watch the videos through this blog entry.)

And, as for YouTube, the clips that were the points of contention were fascinating. The films of Bob Rafelson that everyone knows — his early work for BBS (his company with Schneider and Blauner) — were fine with YT. It was his later movies that are owned outright and that no one can EVER post sequences from. And with Godard it gets even hairier.

Godard mixes three overlaid
images with (at least) two audio tracks
in Histoire(s) du Cinema.

Uncle Jean (as I like to call him, based on his role in the film Prenom Carmen) was a “mix-master,” a sampler of longstanding. He used words from other writers, images from painters, and music from classical composers in his Sixties films, and by the Eighties was crafting video essays that were composed almost entirely of others’ work, reassembled by his hand (one of his first notable articles was called, “Montage, My Fine Care”). 

However, since he was using other people’s work so heavily, when you post HIS work on YouTube, you find that the original sources are banned — most notably, one German classical CD label does not want to monetize your clip (or, more accurately, Godard’s clip) with their sounds on it, they want you “banned” outright.

Godard also worked actively at one point with a record label that released the soundtracks of his films (complete, with every sound, every newly spoken word, and all the thousands of sounds he had taken from other sources on their discs). This has caused his “late-period” masterpiece Histoire(s) du Cinema to have its sound banned entirely from YouTube — at the moment you post a video including a clip from his video epic, you are “internationally banned” for using JLG’s sound (his name appears as the copyright owner), even though he was fond of putting “No Copy Right” at the end of his video essays and he publicly supported (to the tune of donating 1,000 euros!) a downloader who was under indictment, saying “There is no such thing as intellectual property.”

After facing this obstacle, there was only one way to go: away from U.S. video platforms. OK.ru truly fits JLG’s dictum and thus has not just hundreds, but thousands of films on it. It now has the “missing” episodes of my cable-access series, and I can think of no better company to be in than a crazy digital library of thousands of films. Here is the link to the Media Funhouse channel. 

Now, onto the shows:

I have new episodes paying tribute to Godard in the works, but first of all wanted to reshow older Funhouse eps in which I focused on his films. Firstly, there is part one of my interview from 2004 with Colin MacCabe, the film historian who wrote the first English-language biography of Godard.

MacCabe discusses his book in this interview but also answers questions about broader concepts in Godard’s work. He also in this episode discusses what it was like to work with Uncle Jean, as the producer on three of his video essays (and yes, I ask him about clearance of film clips!).

 

Moving back to the “consumer guide” aspect of the Funhouse, I also reshowed this episode, which found me reviewing and showing clips from three new releases: the Eclipse box of films by Godard’s one-time “Dziga-Vertov group” collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Godard’s own Film Socialisme and the mighty, mighty Histoire(s) du Cinema.

 

As for “unseen” Godard, I also have done various episodes on his video essays. I am quite proud of having shown Funhouse viewers one of his most beautiful short creations, “De l'origine du XXIe siècle” (2000) in its entirety in this episode. I include clips from other essays, but “origine” is a most exquisite view of the 20th century that proceeds backward chronologically, mixing newsreels of the realest atrocities with the most fantasy-based images from fiction films, concluding with perhaps the perfect metaphor for a century in which the action never stopped: the dance with the can-can girls in Max Ophuls’ Le Plaisir. (Godard leaves in all the spinning around, but cuts just as the hero falls down while dancing.) 

 

Another absolutely gorgeous Godard short is “Puissance de la Parole” (1988). Godard counterpoints a couple’s emotional breakup over the phone — with dialogue from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice — with an older man and a young girl discussing mankind’s need for knowledge — with dialogue from Poe’s prose poem “The Power of Words” about two deities (or angels, if you prefer) conversing about mortals. 

It’s a stunning work in terms of both its magical inscrutability (the Poe side) and its earthy humanity (the Cain breakup dialogue). Even more stunning is that this work of raw emotion and aesthetic beauty (which ends with the mingling of classical music with songs by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan) was commissioned as a commercial for a phone company. (Thus, the breakup over the phone.) 

 

The episode that I’m most proud of in this batch on ok.ru is the second part of my interview with Colin MacCabe, discussing various aspect of Godard’s work. Firstly, I remade this episode entirely — I edited from the original interview tape, leaving all of what MacCabe had said (I had initially cut a now-fascinating bit about Godard surely opposing the neo-liberalism that runs through current European politics) and using better copies of the film clips I had initially included in the episode. 

Secondly, there is the range of topics we covered in a short amount of time. They include the viewer’s response to Godard’s use of so many references (MacCabe’s answer to this is very instructive; it gives Godard fans an answer to those they may know who remark that Godard’s work is too layered to be comprehensible), Godard’s then-current political position, the use of autobiography in Godard’s essays and fiction films (including his appearances as “Uncle Jean” the crazy filmmaker), the seminal importance of Histoire(s) du Cinema to his output during the late Eighties and Nineties, the themes in his transitional work In Praise of Love, and, not forgetting, Godard’s much-ignored (or misunderstood) sense of humor.

 

I saluted Bob Rafelson first on this blog and then did three episodes on the show about him. The first episode covered his best-known period, in which he made films for his mini-studio BBS, aka the House The Monkees Built. Thus, we begin with Head and end with his non-BBS Stay Hungry.

 

The second episode in this series of shows covers his next three films, which came out at intervals (by this point, Rafelson had burned some bridges in the film industry, and he was also pursuing his biggest interest, traveling). So, we begin with his “comeback” in 1981, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and end with the film he proclaimed his favorite, the adventure saga/character study Mountains of the Moon (1990).

 

The third and last of this series of episodes covers Rafelson’s last four works for hire. These range from the screwball comedy Man Trouble (1992) to his underseen, terrific last film, No Good Deed (2002), starring Samuel L. Jackson. 

 

The next show focuses on a French romantic comedy-drama that hasn’t ever been available in the U.S., Adorable Liar, directed and cowritten by Michel Deville. The most intriguing thing about it is that the two very cute lead actresses later worked for Godard (whereas Deville had just worked with… Anna Karina!): Marina Vlady and Macha Meril. 

It’s a cute, slight film about two sisters from the provinces in Paris. One of them (Marina) lies to men a lot, to the extent that when she finally meets her true love — well, he just doesn’t believe her. Among the cast are two Funhouse faves when they both very young men: Pierre Clementi (in his movie role) and the great Michael Lonsdale. 

 

I was very pleased to interview Balthazar Clementi, the son of the actor-filmmaker Pierre Clementi, when he was in NYC promoting his father’s films as a director (plus the U.S. publication of his dad’s memoir, A Few Personal Messages). 

In this episode (the first of a projected three), we discuss his father’s filmmaking, which works as both a diary of his very busy life in the Sixties and Seventies (with his friends — Nico, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Tina Aumont, Viva — and his costars — Deneuve, Piccoli, Klaus Kinski, Udo Kier — showing up in various candid moments) and avant-garde meditations on the periods in which the footage was shot. 

 

The final new episode (barring an Xmas show that isn’t good to post, for another year at least) was a discussion of, and scenes from, a lost major-studio film that was yet another fascinating failure from the era in which the major studios (MGM, in this case) were all trying to reproduce the success of Easy Rider.

The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970) is an incredible mess, but one of those messes from that insanely productive period in which even the failures make for compelling viewing. Here, the film boasts (besides wonderful NYC location footage) two items that make it one-of-a-kind: the first are two supporting players (folk singer Holly Near and psychedelic frontman turned gay standup comic Michael Greer) who are so good in their roles that they steal the film away from its lead, Don Johnson (in his first film role).

The second amazing aspect of the picture is the score. Certain “hard” bands were signed to MGM Records, so their music fits with the plot and images, but the light, bubblegum sound of the Mike Curb Congregation is also heard. Their cover of “Happy Together” is just lame, but the fact that the catchy-as-fuck “Sweet Gingerbread Man” (by Michel Legrand and Marilyn & Alan Bergman) is used in trippy, sexy scenes (including one right after Johnson has had a threesome with two his hippie girlfriends) is a mind-blower. The song would be better suited for Willy Wonka or Doctor Dolittle, but it wound up in this film and thus made for sublimely silly musical interludes. 

 

Again, the Media Funhouse channel on OK.ru can be found here.

As it currently stands, MNN has reached its new HQ and has put back into action its live streams. This is great news for me, as I welcome every like-minded viewer we can get in “the tent.” As of the day this blog post goes up, the streams at mnn.org are back up and working. The one that airs Media Funhouse at 1:00 a.m. late Saturday/early Sunday can be found here.

I have been informed that they are still fine-tuning these streams, but they look delightful as of this writing, so I can only hope they will remain up and working for a long time to come….

Deceased Artiste Charles Napier, and the 18th anniversary of the first Media Funhouse episode

The Manhattan cable show Media Funhouse went on the air 18 years ago this month, and so I thought it only right to upload the first-ever clip I showed on the program, especially because it featured an actor who left us just last week. First a note about the beginning of the show: in the first few weeks of the program I covered exploitation cinema ("auteurist" exploitation cinema) exclusively. A few weeks in, I was able to diversify the contents of the program when I did my first Deceased Artiste tributes (Fellini, Vincent Price, and Frank Zappa).

To “catch viewers’ attention,” I felt there was no better attraction than the work of Russ Meyer, and thus I presented what I consider the seminal clip from Russ’s work, a montage that is so compelling, so unrelenting, so brilliant, and yet so nuts that it can indoctrinate you instantly into the Meyer cult. And there was no better male lead in any of his films than Charles Napier, a square-jawed blond gent who often played villains, but whom Russ envisaged as a two-fisted hero in the wonderful Cherry, Harry & Raquel (1970) and as a psycho cop in the so-over-the-top-that-it-says-too-much-about-Russ’s-mindset Supervixens (1975), possibly my least-fave Meyer pic.

Napier’s obits explored how the Kentucky native had a number of jobs before he finally settled on acting as his vocation: among other things, he was a high school art teacher, a parking lot attendant, a typist, a truck driver, and (my favorite) a photographer for a trucking magazine.

He was a familiar face on TV, who appeared in Mannix, Kojak, The Rockford Files, Starsky and Hutch, Dallas, and The Incredible Hulk — to which he contributed some of the Hulk’s growls! One of his most memorable TV roles was as a “space hippie” in the Star Trek episode “The Way To Eden.” In recent years, he continued to appear not only in mainstream and “DVD premiere” movies, but also worked as a voice talent for cartoons like Squidbillies and The Critic.

Though he is best known by the general public for his supporting roles in Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and The Blues Brothers, he was indeed beloved by film buffs for his roles in four Russ Meyer movies, and his being a kind of “good luck charm” supporting performer in the films of Jonathan Demme (a casual look over his filmography reveals at least eight Demme films he had prominent small roles in, including such hits as Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia).

While the obit in Variety noted he played a general in four different films, it’s as a sheriff that I’ll always remember him. And speaking of that, below is the clip I spoke about, the scene from the end of Cherry, Harry & Raquel that will convert any neophyte filmgoer into a fan of Russ Meyer. The montage begins in earnest at 1:54 with the great line, "Now all of this didn't really have to happen...."

It’s a power-packed montage that includes virtually every scene in the film (including the odd “thematic” ones in which Uschi Digard is seen symbolically acting out the plot in a desert setting). My high school film teacher maintained that Meyer was the most Eisensteinian of modern filmmakers, and this was undoubtedly true — what he achieves here with his editing and characteristically overwrought narration is to nearly create an “altered state” for the viewer.

He also demonstrates his debt to Eisenstein in the lead-up to the killer montage, in which he intercuts a rather pedestrian showdown between Napier and the actor playing “Apache” with a rather pedestrian lesbian scene, thus creating something exciting out of two rather non-exciting scenes of people clearly pretending to do stuff. Meyer’s world was a ripe and lurid one, and he had no better alter ego than the tough (but oddly friendly-looking) Napier. Please enjoy the scene below — I know you will.


RIP CN/RM

An exploitation pioneer passes: Deceased Artiste David F. Friedman

Dave Friedman was a very amiable gent whom I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing twice. He will go down in history as the last of the old-fashioned, road-tested exploitation producers. He learned at the hands of a master (Kroger Babb), created with Herschell Gordon Lewis the gore movie, made some very dippy nudie-cutie pics with HGL, wrote a great memoir (A Youth in Babylon), and gave us some of the best-ever trailers for softcore pics in the Sixties. He of course also made features to go with these trailers, but they very often (with one or two exceptions) were much less entertaining than the trailers were.

Here is a classic Friedman trailer for his “roughie,” The Defilers:


The Defilers (1965)


Another great one that reflects beautifully Friedman's attitude toward softcore. A free i.d./password for Daily Motion might be required to view this one, but you should have one of those anyway (Daily Motion is a YouTube with no squeamishness about the unclad body):


The Lustful Turk


I thought I had put up the “carnival pitch” clip from my first interview with Mr. Friedman (who did insist on being called “Dave,” as noted in his New York Times obit), but I evidently never did. I will rectify that in the near future. In the meantime, I offer this great bit from my second interview where Dave just laid it on the line about his profession.

The man was a delight to talk to. His trailers may have indeed been better than his films, but I can vouch for the fact that talking to the guy was FAR more entertaining than watching either. He was an extremely friendly legend.

Three lovely ladies exit the stage...

So many talented cult-favorite performers are dying these days it’s difficult to keep up. All three of the actresses below are primarily known for one film performance, but all of them kept going in show business and did interesting things above and beyond their one international “hit” picture.

The first to be announced in the news in the last few days was, as she was called in many obits, “Last Tango in Paris star Maria Schneider.” She definitely will forever be linked with that performance, which she gave 39 years ago, when she was 20 years old. I’m going to assume that readers of this blog are already familiar with that modern masterwork, one of Bertolucci’s most focused (and popular) pics and Brando’s last great starring performance, the one into which he put a full range of emotion and acting genius.

Schneider was indeed incredibly sexy in the film and gave a very fine performance, as her character navigates between very verbal males (Brando, Leaud). The film’s incredible success gave her a “name,” but seems to have typecast her in many producers’ eyes and the fame clearly affected her personal life, as she had a succession of very public problems, including breakdowns, drug troubles, and public affairs — the European press had a field day with her moving into an asylum to be near her lover (I remember something being made of her yelling across a gate that she loved the woman; the press loves nothing more than an emotional breakdown in public).

Thankfully Schneider moved on from her problems and continued to work regularly as an actress. Here are a few clips to remember her by (check out Last Tango… on yer own!):

A great scene from Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), featuring Schneider and Jack Nicholson. A week or two ago New York Times critic A.O. Scott declared the present a “golden age for foreign film.” I’m very glad that he deflects American readers’ attention overseas to where good movies still are being made regularly, but it’s hard not to believe that he declares the present era to be the best-ever because… he’s writing in the present day…. There are indeed miraculous items being made overseas, but when you had Masters like Antonioni on the scene, the term “golden age” was sorta redundant:



She costarred with Joe Dallesandro in Rivette’s uneven but still interesting Merry-Go-Round (1981). Here she plays a game with Joe and speaks in French (no subs) with Daniele Gégauff, a movie producer who was married to screenwriter Paul Gégauff, who I wrote about in my blog entry on Chabrol:



I was trying to remember what “recent” film I’d seen Schneider in. It was a rare Bertrand Blier comedy called Les Acteurs (2000) that I reviewed on the Funhouse TV show in an English-subtitled print. Here is her scene, sans English subs, from the film. The film is an utterly bizarre creation that pays tribute to the acting profession by having a succession of big-named veteran performers appear in episodic scenes concerning the actor’s approach, his madness, his ego, etc. There aren’t as many big-name female stars, but that is explained early on, when one character notes that men’s egos tend to be much, much bigger than women’s. One of the female stars to make an appearance, though, is Ms. Schneider, looking great as a woman “of a certain age”:



Much like Schneider, Lena Nyman was identified by international movie fans with one movie, or in fact two movies, Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) and its sister-movie I Am Curious (Blue) (1968). The films were declared to be “obscene,” but are instead brilliant artifacts of their era, sociological studies that do include sexual interludes between the characters (Nyman plays a slightly fictionalized version of herself), but also interviews with Swedish politicians and Martin Luther King, Jr. The films are brilliant, and the tiny dynamo Nyman is terrific in the lead. Not much can be seen of them online, but here is an outtake from I Am Curious (Blue) in which Lena “abolishes” the state church. I love blasphemy of any kind, and this is a pretty wonderful scene in which Nyman asks a priest how the church became involved with the bourgeoisie, instead of the poor, to whom Christ tended:



Nyman’s only other film seen by American audiences was Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978), in which she played a supporting role. I found a lot of Swedish clips on YT, however, that show she had a rich career and had fans who were touched sufficiently by her death to put up very nice tributes to her. She not only acted but also sang in the movies and on TV, including this scene in a comedy called The Adventures of Picasso (1978), where she plays a nightclub singer who becomes Picasso’s object of affection:



Most of the Lena Nyman clips on YT aren’t subtitled, so I was most “grabbed” by the musical ones and the broadly farcical ones. Here is a clip from a comedy called Dromkaken (1993|), in which Nyman apparently played two characters:



And to repeat the comic device in the last clip, here’s yet another sequence where Nyman’s kooky character again sees the stuffy female lead going to the bathroom (so much for the staid image of the Swedes!):



Nyman may forever be enshrined as a “Lolita” figure because of Sjoman’s films (she was 22 or 23 when I Am Curious (Yellow) was made, btw), but she proved herself to be a broadly versatile performer. One final comedy clip:



I never met Maria Schneider or Lena Nyman in person, but I did meet the third woman whose obit appeared this weekend, the iconic “velvet glove cast in iron,” Ms. Tura Satana. I interviewed Tura Satana back in 1996 at the Chiller Theater convention, and she was a delightful lady who was happy to talk about her past film work, and was pleased that I asked her not only about her three exploitation classics, but also her work in other films, including Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce.

Tura did indeed lead a very colorful life as a model, an exotic dancer, an exploitation movie star, a lover of Elvis (!), a latter-day icon for both women and men who liked dominant women, and one of those few folks who had a band named in her honor. As was the case with Nyman, her fans have posted tribute videos to her:



Her starring role as “Varla” in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) remains her best-remembered contribution to the Western World. She has been copied, imitated, ripped off, and enshrined by various and sundry performers and aspiring exploitation moviemakers, but it’s hard to top the original:



Tura’s other two wonderfully memorable starring roles in exploitation were for Funhouse favorite Ted V. Mikels. She played a “dragon lady” character in the completely deranged and wonderful Astro Zombies:



And is seen briefly doing one of her exotic dance numbers in Ted’s Doll Squad, which supplied the template for Charlie’s Angels, but is a whole lot more, well… Mikels-ian:



I regret that there is only a very small slice of my interview with the great Ms. Santana online. At one time a few years back I had offered the whole thing in the short-lived Funhouse video podcast, and the interview was indeed posted on MySpace by her then-agent/manger. It shows the fervor of the Tura fan-base that my interview with her was so appreciated it got booted (proper attribution was added later, I believe — right before MySpace lost all of its audience in what seemed like one fell swoop. Ah, the fickle social-communitarians on the Web…).

A post-script: I have somewhere the hand-typed thank you note that Ms. Santana wrote after I sent her a VHS of the episode as aired. She was one classy dame, that Tura. And quite the black-clad icon:

Ray Dennis Steckler: the Deceased Artiste career retrospective is now online

I realize the vast majority of folks reading this blog haven’t seen or heard of the Manhattan cable program I’ve been doing for the past 17 years with the same title as the blog. I definitely recommend you check out the Media Funhouse channel on YouTube and the four complete episodes I put up as representative samples of the show.

I did want to put up a sample of the episode-length Deceased Artiste tributes I’ve done on the show, of which I’m very proud. Thus I’ve uploaded the entirety of my Ray Dennis Steckler episode, which aired a few weeks after the man who gave us Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies hit the great divide on Jan. 7, 2009.

I’ve broken the show up into three parts, and uploaded it to Daily Motion, since YT does not tolerate the human body (no nudity please, we’re American and tryin’ ta pretend we’re moral…). The first part of the show includes my verbal overview of Ray’s career, plus some choice clips:


Ray Dennis Steckler tribute--Media Funhouse (part 1 of 3)


Part two features more amazing clips from Ray’s work:


Ray Dennis Steckler tribute--Media Funhouse (part 2 of 3)


And the third and final part features a few more clips and my farewell, plus a bonus: a short tribute to two other Deceased Artistes who died around the time that Steckler did: Bettie Page and the sacred psycho-billy himself, Lux Interior of the Cramps:


Ray Dennis Steckler tribute--Media Funhouse (part 3 of 3)


I’m indeed proud of this show (and yes, I did actually sit through Ray’s demented and very unsexy pornography!). I am glad to offer it up to the fine, discerning viewers who like weird and inexplicable cinema.("Incredibly strange" indeed...)

Neil Innes on George Harrison and Graham Chapman: the Funhouse interview

I’m happy to share two more clips from my interview with founding Bonzo Dog Band member, king of the Rutles, "Seventh Python," and all-around brilliant humorist and musician Neil Innes. The first concerns George Harrison’s reaction to the idea of a second Rutles album:



The second involves a few memories of his friend and writing collaborator Graham Chapman. Right after he told this anecdote Mr. Innes confessed with a laugh, “We didn’t get much writing done!”

Chris Morris: the Funhouse interview

The “hidden” man of British comedy is hidden no more. I was very happy to speak yesterday with Chris Morris — whose career I surveyed on this blog here — in conjunction with the NYC opening of his debut as a feature filmmaker, Four Lions.

Morris has spent a hell of a lot of his career as a radio and TV humorist decimating the interview process, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when I interviewed him about Four Lions and some of his past work. I found that he was more than willing to discuss the different facets of his career, but as notions of process and approach arose, he laughed or made jokes that appeared to sidestep my questions — but then wound up answering them in beautifully eloquent detail.

Four Lions follows a group of dimwitted Islamic terrorists in England as they plan an attack on a charity marathon in London. Morris has taken great care in other interviews to discuss the fact that while the film is entirely fictitious, it was inspired by numerous accounts he had researched of moronic — yet obviously lethal — terrorists. I discussed the film’s characters with him and its distinctly dark comic tone. He noted that it wasn’t his intention to make a dark comedy, but that “the real elements in the data that’s out there undermines the metallic, cast-iron image of these people.” The tone didn’t guide the creation of the jokes, therefore, but rather the subject itself dictated the humor.

As for the characters, the film’s protagonist Omar (Riz Ahmed) is a family man whom the audience can relate to on certain levels, while marveling at his wrong-headed and dangerous philosophy — this split in the character is best exemplified by the pleasant-seeming conversations he has with his wife and son about how he intends to die for the cause. His counterpart is Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a temperamental working-class Englishman who follows his own Al-Qaeda-inspired values without question.

“Omar does have a conscience, he believes in right and wrong, while Barry just believes in wrong,” says Morris. “We had a sequence that was cut, in which the characters were playing their subtext cards too openly. Omar tries to argue that sometimes to do the right thing you have to do the wrong thing…. Barry laughs at him because Omar is tangled up in a confused conscience. Barry is happily doing the wrong thing.”

I found that Barry relates to many of Morris’ past comic creations, in that he speaks nonsense with an absolute air of certainty.



Four Lions benefits from a documentary-like visual style that, at points, reports the truth of a situation, and in some others slightly misleads the viewer for comic purposes. Discussing the use of documentary techniques to study a terrorist cell in a fiction film, Morris says: “It’s a long-established technique from at least Battle of Algiers, and probably before…. It’s sometimes good if the camera is left on the table and forgotten. In that way, the camera’s not quite seeing everything it should. When we shot, I worked out the orthodox camera positions and then banned them, and then used what was left.” The result, he says, is that “it’s as if you’re never quite in the right place,” in order to bring the viewer into the action.

Like Morris’ TV series Brass Eye and Nathan Barley, the film also includes wonderfully ridiculous scenes where its characters interact with new media, including chat rooms, handicams, and cellphone SIM cards. Reflecting on the characters’ repeated attempts to make video manifestos, Morris remarks on a court transcript he read that included MI-5 surveillance on would-be terrorists who argued with each other about whether a video camera should be used to record images, and whether Bin Laden did it.

“So they’re taking elements of Islamic law, and there’s this sort of confused conversation” that winds up with the one gent deciding that Bin Laden must shoot his videos in a mirror, because that would be okay.” Morris adds that he wouldn’t be surprised to find a real-life cell that was making its own video documentary, “because that would excite them, allow them to say, ‘yeah, that’s how we are.’ Unfortunately, I suspect it would show all to clearly that’s how they are….”

Until that particular “idiots’ manifesto” comes out, we can make do with Four Lions, which has Morris again finding the humor in an extremely taboo topic.

As a bonus in this entry, I will note that I also discussed Morris’ past work with him. Segments from that part of the interview will appear in this blog and on the Funhouse TV show in the weeks to come. One of his most direct and enlightening answers came to my question about his radio “feedback reports” (man on the street interviews) which, of course, were later modified to include show-biz celebrities and politicians on Brass Eye. As is indicated by his answer here, Morris’ humor is indeed well thought-out but, most importantly, it’s very, very funny.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa: the Funhouse interview

I have been a big fan of the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa since I saw his License to Live at the New York Film Festival. My interview with him took place in July of 2001, at the time that the Screening Room in Tribeca was conducting a retrospective of his work. I used the interview to create two episodes of the Funhouse and also an article for time.com, which you can find on that website or here. His answers were translated by Linda Hoaglund, who has subtitled some of his films.

Here he talks about his love of the films of John Cassavetes:



And here he discusses the use of sound in his films:

Budd Boetticher: the Funhouse interview

This is one of the numerous interviews done for the Funhouse before the "digital era" arrived. I spoke to Budd in September of 2000, and it was a delight. The man was a no-nonsense type who was happy to tell stories about his filmmaking (and bullfighting) past. He was an incredibly engaging individual, as charming as the heroes (and villains) in his pictures.

Here he speaks about his friend John Ford:



And answers a question about filming in CinemaScope:

Sin in the Suburbs: Deceased Artiste Joe Sarno

Joe Sarno, who died earlier this week at 89, was one of the most unique figures in movie history, simply because he evidenced true talent in the pretty murky business of sexploitation, where having talent is something of a liability (and largely unnecessary). Sure, there was Radley Metzger, the king of artful Euro-chic soft- and hardcore, an incredibly talented (and yes, occasionally “incredibly strange”) filmmaker. There was Russ Meyer, who was one of the finest film editors there ever was, in any genre. Findlay was fascinating; Wishman unpredictable and mostly amusing; Friedman and H.G. Lewis thumbing their nose at the whole silly thing.

But Joseph W. Sarno, as he was often billed, was a guy who made dozens of softcore features in the Sixties and early Seventies, and he invested them with an identity. He had a very distinct look to these features (particularly the ones in b&w), and he wrote screenplays that included ample amounts of sex, but also contained an element that you just were not going to see in conventional adult cinema, which was guilt. Joe started making films in Sweden in the Sixties, and his films are very much in tune with Bergman and the Scandinavian cinema of the time (in fact there is very little chance you’d guess his biggest hit, Inga, was directed by an American).

I interviewed Joe three times, and sadly the one that aired on the Funhouse TV show was perhaps the weakest chat of the three, as his memory was very poor when it came to specific details about his films. Granted, the man made as many as a half-dozen films in certain years, and continued to toil in the sex industry on hardcore films/videos that had no personal content from the mid-Seventies to the late Eighties (a fact he concealed, and talked around, in our interview). When I later interviewed Joe, I knew to avoid trying to get specific details on specific films from him, and instead just discussed his memories of making films under severe budgetary constraints, and had him speak about his writing and crafting of images.

My last interview with him was in person at his apartment, when I was writing the DVD booklet notes for his “comeback” feature for the New Jersey mini-studio Seduction Cinema, Suburban Secrets. The film was quite a bizarre and welcome move from an old pro: a very low budget feature of the kind he was used to, but with an original script by Joe and “final cut” on a director’s version of the material. What the company wound up releasing was pretty much unprecedented: a two-disc set of the “hot cut” of the material (the cable 90-minute film that emphasized the sex sequences), and a two-and-a-half hour (you didn’t read that wrong, two-and-a-half hour!) “director’s cut.”

What resulted was a film that was intimately connected to what Joe had done in is Seventies “suburban” films, albeit with the limitations of today’s softcore market (which forbids a number of things that showed up in films before the rule books had truly been written) and some off-kilter performances. Joe’s dialogue was nothing if not emphatic and declarative, and two of the actresses — porn star Tina Tyler and Seduction starlet A.J. Khan — were the only performers who really truly nailed the “heightened” (and, yes again, “incredibly strange”) nature of what he was up to.

In any case, I don’t think I can further describe the tenets of Joe’s style better than I did in the booklet for Suburban Secrets, so I will excerpt here some of what I wrote there (noting that this was first published in 2006 in a Seduction Cinema release, and appears here with the written permission of the author and publication of first instance.) We start off at the point where I’m mentioning a major part of Joe’s appeal, as a filmmaker and as a person, his sincerity. Probably the key aspect here is that Joe was a genuinely nice person, who happened to have made some uniquely kinky movies. Which is never, ever a bad thing.

*******
Revelations drive the storyline of Suburban Secrets, but the key “secret” here is that this feverish sex picture is the product of a genuinely sincere moviemaker who is 84 years of age as of this writing. Erotica is considered a young man’s game, although anyone familiar with Antonioni’s later works (Identification of a Woman, Eros) knows that an artist over 70 can still produce blissfully carnal works of art.

Sarno’s earnestness may cause some folks to be amused by his highly stylized approach, but the fact of the matter is that Secrets contains several object lessons for the younger directors who create “steamy” fodder for the delectation of late-night cable viewers and DVD renters with an eye out for “couples” erotica (those wanting to “get her in the mood” or, conversely, “wake him up”). So take a lesson, young pornographers, as Professor Sarno imparts his secrets:

Focus on women’s libidos. When asked about the central theme in his films, Sarno unhesitatingly answers, “strong women!” The ladies here aren’t shy at all about their desires — “I desperately want to be wrapped around him when I come,” proclaims Cynthia at one point. As a result, Sarno’s movies don’t alienate female viewers in the way that “money shot”-centric porn does… and it goes without saying that many men get turned on by the sight of a strong-willed female conquering all the men, and women, in her path.

Ditch the “mood music” and flashy editing. “I’ve had a number of producers who were embarrassed by the films I made, because the sex looked so real to them,” declares Sarno. Although his 1970s softcore work is notable because the actors were often having real sex onscreen (as in the Girl Meets Girl Trilogy, distributed by Retro-Seduction), Sarno emphasizes that he has no problem working with the present-day limitations of the softcore genre, the so-called “three Ps”: no penetration, no penises and no “pink” onscreen.

“Even in a film like Abigail Leslie…, the sex was really what I call ‘assumed contact.’ I work with my actors to regulate their breathing as it would be under a sexual situation. If you do that, work on the sounds and the breathing, you get the feeling that it’s real… that’s what I’m looking for.” Thus, Joe has no use for the faux-jazz and rock music used in standard sex movies. He also favors “long takes” which keep the action moving at a steady pace, and contribute what he calls “a certain truth” to a sex scene.

Vary the angles in sex scenes. The long-take sex scenes requires that the actors change position in the frame as they proceed to the nearest bedroom; at one point Laura and Aunt Cynthia move to the background of a shot as they grope each other towards a doorway. Unconventional framing like this brings home to the viewer the fact that the characters will literally stop at nothing to satisfy their lust.

When a character’s not having sex, they should be obsessing over it. Here the “expectation” factor that is a trademark of Sarno’s work kicks into high gear. His central characters often are so intent on getting into each other’s pants that they talk obsessively about their intended’s anatomy or just fixate on it while attending to daily tasks.

Ignore the prevailing attitudes about age and body types. Sarno has made a practice since his black-and-white “swingers” pics in the early 1960s of using older actresses, as well as thinner women and the occasional zoftig babe, as sex objects. Here Joe is ably aided by Seduction Cinema’s very appealing stable of “natural girls”: Suburban Secrets features curvy chicks, ultra-thin vixens, and an immaculately hot fiftysomething character whose passions rival those of her twentysomething niece.

Aspiring filmmakers can learn a lot from Sarno, but there are certain elements that are unique to his work. Chief among them is his stylized dialogue, which combines street sex talk, whimsical words (like the Yiddish shtup) and melodramatic declarations like Cythnia’s frank, “I’ve always worshipped at the altar of my own intense orgasms….” One sees echoes of great filmmakers like Bergman in Joe’s work, but his dialogue reminds us that his softcore was influenced more by the great playwrights — Ibsen, O’Neill, Williams – who created “hothouse” environments for their tormented, lusty characters. He explains that his dialogue is “intended to be a little above reality. What the audience hears is the tone of the words, and that’s what I want.”

The last, most important, element of Suburban Secrets is its controversial subject matter. Sarno has dealt with incestuous relationships in a few of his previous films — from his 1969 Swedish feature The Indelicate Balance (found on the Seduction of Inga release from Retro-Seduction) to Confessions of a Young American Housewife (1974) and Abigail Leslie… (1975). He included it in this film because “this situation happens more than you think. In high school, a friend of mine was involved in an incestuous relationship with his mother. I was with him so much it was obvious, I knew something was going on. I base the sexual situations in my films on things I’ve seen, things I’ve heard over the years….”

There is also the matter of the female characters’ frank discussion of their teenage, and even preteen, encounters with sex. Contemporary “indie” filmmakers like Todd Solondz (Palindromes) and Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin) deal with this theme in honest, open ways in their works, but for a softcore director to introduce it in his dialogue is challenging and unusual.

“The hardest thing about that is to say to yourself, ‘am I willing to go into it, and should I?’ I always say to myself, yes I should. I’m not looking to titillate anybody as far as that’s concerned, but I think you can utilize this subject to make a good story….” Asked if he has considered the response this topic provokes in more conservative souls, Joe replies curtly, “I’m not afraid to terrify people. I utilize those little thoughts in the back of people’s minds, and bring them to the fore….”

From my interview with Joe:



From my interview with Joe, about one of his most intriguing creations, Young Playthings:



And a scene from the film (no good copy of the picture has of yet been found in the U.S.):

Young Playthings
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And from one of his favorite films, Abigail Leslie is Back in Town (aka Abigail Lesley...):

The seriously silly Mr. Neil Innes: the Funhouse interview

This week I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Neil Innes, the terrifically talented singer-songwriter-humorist who co-founded the Bonzo Dog Band, has been dubbed “the Seventh Python,” and, most prominently, was (and is) the driving force behind the Rutles.

As a preview of our chat, which lasted over an hour, and yielded great anecdotes about the Bonzos, the Beatles, and the Pythons, I offer a trio of clips. First, Neil reminisces about the early days of the Bonzos:



Next, he holds forth on the current state of pitching television programs in England (and, one would assume, over here). He also sings the praises of YouTube, and slams b.s. in general:



And, last, he talks about his less-discussed serious side, and his latest "identity":

Mike Kuchar: The Funhouse interview

The influence of the Kuchar Brothers on “underground” and independent cinema can’t be overestimated. Their unique view of the world and unique methods of moviemaking are addictive — once you become a fan, you’re a fan for life. Thus, I was very happy to recently interview Mike Kuchar on the occasion of screenings of his new video works at the Anthology Film Archives.

Here he discusses his love of Hollywood movies, in particular lower-budgeted genre movies, which he considered more “friendly” and personal:



And here he discusses the gorgeously overwrought color in his best-known film, the cult classic Sins of the Fleshapoids:



For those who aren't familiar with Mike's work, three of his classic films are available on DVD, on the Sins of the Fleshapoids collection. Two of those three are also available on YouTube (ain't it interesting how these things work?). The first is the selfsame no-budget camp sci-fi masterwork Sins (1965):



The other available example of his work is fascinating, as it points the way to early John Waters (particularly one notable kissing sequence), The Craven Sluck (1967):