Sam Fuller’s “missing” first novel: ‘Burn, Baby, Burn!’ (1935)

The book (sans dust-jacket)

Everybody’s gotta start someplace. Samuel Fuller started his writing career in journalism, moving up from paper boy to copy boy to full-fledged reporter, filing stories just as fast as he could write them. His work as a newspaperman infused his later screenplays (for other directors and himself) and most certainly his dozen novels.

I’ll try to cover his most accessible (read: not super-costly) novels in another post, but I was lucky enough to find a copy of his debut book, Burn, Baby, Burn (1935) for a reasonable price (read: more than I ordinarily pay, but this one normally goes for thousands). 

It’s a slight book but is fun as an artifact of his first period in Hollywood in the 1930s. During this period, Sam (identified that way on the cover; his later books were credited to Samuel [or Samuel Michael] Fuller) was not above sketching Hollywood by including laundry lists of movie stars and noted newspaper columnists. 

When the lead character talks to his fellow reporters about him going to Hollywood, he explains: “… I’m going to be a writer. You know, write all that high-class stuff you see credited to guys like Norman Krasna, Nat Perrin, Art Sheekman and —” (Burn, Baby, Burn, Phoenix Press, New York, 1935, [p. 23]) Fuller even puts Perrin (who he notes “resembled Chico Marx, the comedian.” [p. 140]) and Louella Parsons into the novel, talking to the protagonists. 

At a later point, the lead takes a friend to a ritzy Hollywood restaurant:

“You sap,” said Open, “this is the classiest place in town. Only the nicest people come here. Look, there’s Jean Harlow and William Powell. And over there is Mary Astor and George S. Kaufman. And right behind you is Marion Davies and Irene Dunne. And you … you lug … you order beer after a lecture on liquor like that.” [p. 181]

The plot is very simple: reporter Open Braddagher finds himself hired by a Hollywood studio after he writes about a celebrated murder case. (The reporter is nicknamed “Open” because of “his cocksure blatherskite tactics on assignments.” [p. 9]) 

Sam Fuller (left) with
Don Ameche, 1941.

On the train to Hollywood, he sits in the dining car across from an attractive woman who pays him no mind. Upon his arrival in Tinseltown he settles in for what he thinks will be a good run as a high-paid screenwriter. 

But the young woman from the train turns out to be a small-town reporter named Margot Campbell who scoops him by quickly writing a script about the same murder case he was supposed to write about. He is ruined by the success of the movie she wrote (which is produced very quickly by a “poverty row” studio) and returns to NYC. 

His big “comeback” in the news business is the “Electric Chair Baby” story, about a woman who’s set to be executed whom Braddagher finds out is pregnant. Open realizes this is his big chance to break an important story — even if he fudges the details a bit. He gets the exclusive on the story and manufactures a melodramatic tale that is syndicated to various papers around the country. 

The nationwide success of his articles brings him back to Hollywood where he becomes an actor-scripter and scores big with a movie version of the Electric Chair Baby story (called “Life Begins”). He takes revenge on Margot by hiring her to write the sequel for him. He humiliates her in public, to get even for her previously scooping him. She walks off the picture and isn’t heard from for a while, leaving all to assume she’s returned to her former papers (in Evansville and Rochester, Minn). 

Open then pitches a gigantic epic sequel (called “Life Begins Again”) in which the viewer is given various details about the birth of a baby. The film is finished and then (only then, since this is a comedy) the studio finds that the Hays Office (the famed H'wood censor of the time) is banning the film for revealing “how a baby is born.” The studio takes a giant financial hit as a result and Open is fired. 

He spends the money he had collected from his salary on various trips (and drinking — Open does a LOT of drinking in this book). He then finally ends up (no surprise) back in NYC as a reporter. 

He finally gets another plum story — a bomb has gone off in the 14th Street subway stop. (Attributed to a bunch of “Reds.”) Open immediately plans a special angle on it but gets arrested by a cop who has a grudge against him. He finds the next day that he’s a star reporter again — for Margot somehow (don’t ask) filed his story for him in time to scoop the other papers. The two reporters are reunited and admit their love for each other leading to... a happy ending.

*****

Burn is certainly not a major work by Fuller, but it does show him in a different light, tackling the screwball comedy genre — because our two reporter protagonists are both heartsick with love for each other, but are both hardboiled types who are too stubborn to admit it — and will even ruin their own lives in the process of not admitting it. Until, of course, it’s time for the “final clinch” and for them to reveal their love for each other. 

He thus plots the book so that Margot is sketched as a logical, talented writer and Open is a creature of instinct who knows how to “sell” a story. Margot’s love for Open remains no matter what he does to her and, true to the genre (one thinks of the ultimate newspaper romance, His Girl Friday), he does pile on a lot of punishment — but also secretly burns for her. (Thus, the profuse drinking and his jealousy whenever she’s seen in the company of any other man.)

The drawback is that the book is unadulterated humor and, as demonstrated by his films, Fuller’s sense of humor was sharpest when it was ironic or dark. He chose Hollywood as the setting for Burn, and mocks the town playfully — perhaps because he was still hoping to sell his stories for big bucks? The other location is one he knew intimately, a NYC newspaper.

The famous photo of young Sam
as a newspaperman.

Fuller also seeks to emulate the newspapermen who became authors of humorous short stories. Modern readers are most familiar with the names Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon. Runyon, in particular, created his own universe of crooks, gamblers, and losers, by adopting a present-tense, side-of-the-mouth type of speech to tell stories that were allegories and morality plays in gangster get-up.

Fuller didn’t write third-person Runyonese, but he does have his characters move back into newspaperman speak and street talk at some points. (In his movies, there are many examples of this kind of dialogue; one of the most famous is Gene Evans in Steel Helmet yelling at a wounded soldier, “If you die, I’ll kill you!”)

“Oh yeah,” ranted Open. “Well, listen to me, you babies. I’m through with you and the work you stand for. Work!” He spat on the floor. “You hang around and chase drowning kids, fire engines and emergency trucks. For what? I have plenty of gorgeous dolls, lots of dough, cases of Rye and a swell apartment. Why, I’ll even have —”

“Aw, shut up. Quit having a pipe dream. Hollywood’s crowded with more pen-pushers than the city jail can hold,” said Blue. “Forget it, big-shot. Go back to the Mail and pound your Royal. It needed a new ribbon the last time I saw it.” [pp. 24-25]

Another jab, this time at Hollywood execs. The exec is on the phone with a friend who invites him to a prestigious H’wood party:

“Who’s going to be there?” asked Pfiffer.

“Oh, Louis B. Mayer, Darryl Zanuck, Ismael R. Alvarez, Sam Goldwyn, Ving Fuller, that famous New York cartoonist, J. Walter Ruben, Jesse Lasky, Patricia Ellis, Sylvia Sidney — hell, Pfiffer, everyone that’s anyone will be there.”

“Nope -— nope, Brock. I don’t think I can make it.”

“But why not? I’m depending on you for good stories.”

“When is this?”

“Now. They’re coming in already. It’s something new in Hollywood. A day-time party.”

“Nope, Brock, I’m sorry — I can’t come over there now.”

“But tell me — why not?” Brock insisted.

“I have to go over to the hospital to see my grandfather who’s dying….”

“Oh… that’s too bad...”

“But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Brock.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll join you as soon as he dies.” [pp. 209-10]

*****

Not so surprising, however, is the fact that Sam was able to quickly and brilliantly sketch a disaster in the breathless style of a great reporter. Here is that passage, which connects directly with his best work as a filmmaker: 

*****

The most intriguing thing about the novel at first glance, of course, is its title. It’s not noted anywhere online that the phrase “Burn, baby, burn!” existed before the 1960s, but it is recorded on many African American history sites (and the ever-dubious-but-has-footnotes Wikipedia) that the r&b/soul DJ known as “Magnificent Montague” used it as a tagline on his show, and then it became a rallying cry during the 1965 Watts riots.

Fuller uses it in this novel as a variation on “Go, baby, go!” or “Fume all ya want!” The first use of it occurs when Open is “all burned up” at Margot for offering to finance him when he’s down on his luck after she scoops his script. She yells down to him from her window at the studio, and…

“People stared up at the figure of the beautiful blonde. Open halted in his tracks, deciding to see what the pest wanted, and looked up.

Margot timed her words, noticing the color in Open’s face turn from an ordinary red to the brightest, most scarlet tint as she shouted at the top of her voice:

“Burn, baby, burn!” [p. 132]

The second appearance of the phrase is as a title for Open’s big-budget follow up to his Electric Chair Baby movie. A movie mogul explains to him:

“… Look at Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. Warner Brothers are cleaning up with musicals. Wait – I got a fine hallucination this minute. I can see the electric chair in the middle of the set. Twenty Tycoon [a fictional studio in the book] beauties on one side, twenty Tycoon beauties on the other — a hot routine — plenty of smoke — like a fire — and we name it Burn, Baby Burn! Now, what about it?” [p. 178]

The final time the phrase is used is at the very end of the book, during the “final clinch”:

“The flashlight snapped Open out of it. Everyone in the editorial department laughed and applauded. This time his face was ten times redder than Stalin’s best nightgown.

Margot threw her arms around the crimsoned-face Open, kissed him again and again, shouting:

“Burn, baby, burn!” [p. 246]

*****

Most interesting is reading Sam’s own mentions of the book, as he took the Electric Chair Baby plot and made it seem that that it was the central part of the book (and the reason for him writing it). In the untranslated book-length interview Il etait une fois… Samuel Fuller, Fuller told Jean Narboni and Noel Simsolo that an editor encouraged him to write a book.

“There was a question that was close to my heart: is it legal, is it moral to execute a condemned woman if she is pregnant? So I wrote Burn, Baby, Burn as a response.” (Il Etait Une Fois… Samuel Fuller, Narboni and Simsolo, Cahiers du Cinema, 1986, translation mine [p. 60]) He never returns to Burn in this interview and thus makes it seem as if all of Burn is about the Electric Chair Baby.

He is closer to an accurate description of the plot in his autobiography A Third Face, after he repeats the same contention (that the entire reason the book was written was because of a subplot that only takes up a few pages in the book). He starts out with a discussion of the subplot:

“The yarn kicks off with a pregnant woman condemned to die in the electric chair. I must have been so obsessed with the electric chair that I used it as a fictional hook, finding a release for some of my nightmarish memories of prisoners getting fried at Sing Sing. Is it moral to execute a condemned woman and her innocent, unborn child? My hero is a hotshot New York reporter, named Bradagher [sic], who covers the story. The young wise guy accepts an offer from a Hollywood bigwig to go out to the West Coast and develop his articles about the case [wrong case] into a movie script. The brash, fast-talking, whiskey-drinking Bradagher thinks he’s got the world by the tail. Then he falls for a gorgeous blonde who happens to be a reporter-turned-screenwriter, too….

“I got a big kick out of spinning that tale, weaving in tributes to Park Row mentors like Gene Fowler, knocking out an unrepentant love story, shifting scenes from Manhattan to Hollywood and the world of studio screenwriting. The Hollywood stuff in Burn, Baby, Burn came from my brief visit to see Fowler in la-la land during my hobo period.” [A Third Face, Samuel Fuller, with Christa Lang Fuller and Jerome Henry Rudes, Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2002 [pp. 77-78]

Sam then goes on to tell Fowler and Dorothy Parker stories. He concludes the section on the book by noting that it was serialized in American Weekly magazine. He refers to the novel as “pulp fiction,” which it really could only be labelled as such if one considers all non-literary fiction to be pulp fiction. He adds, “It got one printing run, and I got a check for a grand or two. That was that, no reprints or backlisting.” [p. 78] 

He also explains the book’s dedication: Perc Westmore, he says, was “one of the most important makeup artists of the day. Perc had been very helpful by showing me around the studios, giving me an insider’s look at Hollywood.”

*****

Burn is one of four novels by Sam that are hard to find at a reasonable price. Two of these have been written up in blog entries by souls who were lucky enough to happen upon copies — his second novel, Test Tube Baby (1936), is summarized and reviewed here. The two “Baby” novels usually go for thousands, very definitely so if they are being sold with the dust-jacket intact. (My copy of “Burn” has no jacket, and there appear to be no images of the original jacket online.)

Fuller’s own movie tie-in novel for his film The Naked Kiss is another rarity that sells for high prices, most likely because it was given a low print run. The odd thing is that one can find the preceding Fuller tie-in novel, Shock Corridor, which was written by tie-in specialist Michael Avallone, in its English edition and in translation in several languages. The paperback Naked Kiss is summarized and reviewed here.

Two other Fuller novels are unfindable because one is rarer than rare (Make Up and Kiss, 1938) and the other because it was never issued in an English version (The Rifle). It should be noted — in the “American cultural gods and goddesses are more revered overseas than they are in their home country” department — that Sam’s novels from Dark Page on have remained in print in France and other European countries for decades. In translation, of course.

*****

And, for movie trivia buffs, it’s interesting to note that the year after Sam wrote Burn, he cowrote a screenplay about rival press agents promoting the expositions in adjoining Texas cities for the B-movie musical Hats Off starring John Payne and Mae Clarke. The film was his first onscreen credit, for “original story and screenplay” with cowriter Edmund Joseph.

The film puts the rivalry/love affair in the foreground for most of its running time, as we watch the couple dating and hatching their respective plans to promote the expositions. Clarke has lied to Payne about her identity, so that she can find out his plans for promoting the other city; the two go on dates while Payne is unaware that she is his primary rival.

The most interesting and amusing layer added to the relationship is that Mae Clarke’s character is hiding her identity (because, she claims, women can’t get jobs as publicists), so fey character actor Franklyn Pangborn is recruited to play her. (Her name is “Jo,” so Pangborn becomes “Joe.”) The weirdest twist: to announce a boxing match held in one city’s exposition, two singing trios describe every punch and knockdown in song.

In his autobiography A Third Face, Sam outlines his initial script for the film, noting that it set the rivalry in prehistoric times for comic effect. He says that director Boris Petroff “cut out all the political aspects of my story” and “kept only the most absurd stuff.” His final take on it? “… the finished film had just about nothing to do with my original story.” (A Third Face [pp. 85-86])

In this case, as in Burn, the woman is the one who capitulates (letting Payne stage her biggest idea, a show put on by a Broadway NYC impresario). Payne ultimately feels guilty, but then the couple end up back together just before the credits roll — and all in one hour! B-movies had to tightly constructed, above all else.

The film is up on YT from a few different posters. I watched this version.

*****

Given what we have access to by Fuller, I can say that Burn is his only print “light entertainment.” Aside from its Fuller pedigree, it’s not as sharp as the Hollywood stories of Fitzgerald (“The Pat Hobby stories” and The Last Tycoon) and was certainly not intended to be a dark piece of apocalyptic satire like West’s brilliant Day of the Locust. 

While Fuller’s novel The Dark Page (1944) is a better novel about reporting at a newspaper, Burn is a few hours of pleasant reading and offers an intriguingly fictionalized chronicle of the process of a screenwriter becoming a “fair-haired boy” one day and being utterly decimated by executives and colleagues on the next. 

Sam went on to have a solid period of filmmaking under Darryl F. Zanuck in the Fifties, but then faced immeasurable difficulty getting a film made in the Sixties and Seventies. Thus, Burn is the product of a younger Fuller who has acknowledged how awful the studio system treated its lower-ranking personnel — and how it also fostered talents that were truly eccentric and one-of-a-kind.

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.”

The Funhouse interview: Balthazar Clementi on Pierre Clementi

Here are two excerpts from the Funhouse interview with Balthazar Clementi that explores the life and career of his father, French actor-filmmaker Pierre Clementi, best known in America for his scene-stealing roles in Bunuel’s Belle de Jour and Bertolucci’s The Conformist, as well as his starring turns in cult films like Bertolucci’s Partner, Marc’o’s Les Idoles, and Liliana Cavani’s The Year of the Cannibals. 

We covered a lot of ground in the hour in which we spoke; the result was three visually stunning Funhouse episodes that emphasized Pierre’s work as a filmmaker but also spotlighted a few of his best-loved film performances.

In this excerpt I start out mentioning the comparisons by film historians of Pierre's work to Kenneth Anger, most likely because they both used dense overlaid imagery in their films. We then discuss the in-camera process Pierre used to create those overlaid images. Balthazar maintained in a question after this that Pierre was directly influenced only by one filmmaker — his friend (whose films he appeared in), Etienne O’Leary, a Canadian who made a trio of influential short avant-garde films in France, and then stopped making films due to medical problems. (O’Leary also appeared in Clementi’s films, sealing the bond of mutual admiration.)

 

In this clip we talk about how Clementi’s life changed after his famous 1972 arrest in Italy in the early Seventies (on a trumped-up drug charge) that led to him losing a year and a half of his career while being in prison. Upon his release, he had even less interest in doing acting work for money’s sake and was known to literally give away the money he made.

The interview with Balthazar was done in conjunction with a festival of Pierre Clementi’s films at MoMA. The other tie-ins concerned the release of a limited edition “Integrale” box of Clementi’s films (containing the nine films on both Blu-ray discs and DVDs, with optional English subs; still available as of this writing) and the long-awaited English translation of Clementi’s 1970s memoir (and essay on the prison state in Italy) <i>A Few Personal Messages</i>, from the small press actually called Small Press.

The interview, which was audio-only on this occasion, was conducted in Central Park, a first for the Funhouse! Here is a pic of Balthazar and me after our talk. He was quite forthcoming in our talk (providing very personal remarks about his birth and his father's later life), for which I thank him. (Thanks also go to Ivan Galietti, for his great translation, heard on these clips.)

Notes on the screening of 'The Movie Orgy' (aka 'Son of Movie Orgy') at Anthology Film Archives — plus, the best 'Orgy' clips found online

There is nothing like the moviegoing experience. And there are movies that depend on that experience to be successfully enjoyed. One of these is Joe Dante and Jon Davison’s much-talked-about but too-little-seen movie-clip marathon The Movie Orgy (started in 1966; reshown and rebuilt for a decade after that).

The film fits in very comfortably with the Sixties ethos of nostalgia-loving and inserting b&w movie clips into weird places. Certain moments in it — where more famous old-time movie stars are seen “reacting” to other, unrelated footage (usually a B-feature with few recognizable faces) — is so Sixties that I’m not sure what today’s audience as a whole make of it. In fact, a lot of Movie Orgy moves along at a very fast clip, but it also incorporates the equivalent of abridged versions of various B-pictures, so it does end up telling complete stories, in fact several of them.

So what actually is the Orgy? It began as an idea for a movie “happening,” according to Joe Dante, based on the fact that colleges in the mid-Sixties were presenting showings of the serials of the ’30s and ’40s, with all the chapters shown in one marathon screening. Dante and Davidson thus created their own movie marathon, made up of various segments from B-features, plus numerous other items they had found on 16mm — scenes from more high-profile major-studio films from the past, TV episodes from the Fifties (with the spotlight on children’s TV), TV commercials, educational films, and even stag reels. 

The B features that we see a lot of include The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, Tarantula, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, and The Giant Claw. The non-monster pics include the high-key crime/car race drama Speed Crazy and the Albert Zugsmith epic College Confidential. (Not one of Steve Allen’s better moments.) A Western movie serial and some Western B-features are thrown into the mix — something an audience brought up in the Fifties would immediately relate to (but today’s younger viewers encounter the Old West primarily through video games, not an endless flow of low-budget oaters).

The younger Joe Dante.

I saw the Orgy the other evening at the invaluable Anthology Film Archives here in Manhattan (which is showing the compilation once more, on Monday, April 10). The film was shown at its present length, around four hours and 45 minutes. (Originally the “happening” version at the Philadelphia College of Art where Dante and Davidson went to school ran up to seven hours.) No admission charge was in place to see the film, as the clips in it were never licensed and it can only be shown in not-for-profit contexts.

My own reaction to Orgy is that it’s a load of fun but is overly long for something viewed with an audience that is passive. The filmgoers at Anthology seemed to enjoy it on the whole and did laugh at many of the gags created by the intercutting of footage (with some other items playing out to stone silence), but aside from laughter, the viewers were taking in the project as if it were a narrative film of its own. No friendly outbursts from this crowd — for a film that seemed to have been made for audience interaction of some sort. (Dante mentioned singalongs to the theme songs for the kids shows included in the compilation; my audience was mostly too young to know “M-I-C… See ya real soon!… K-E-Y ... M-O-U-S-E”)

It was very apparent that Orgy was a product of the Sixties and early Seventies, when movie viewers smoked pot in the theaters for even the straightest films (I remember this distinctly as a kid during that era), never mind a movie-clip extravaganza. Alas, no one is going to light up in a 2023 NYC movie theater. Nor did the Anthology viewers seem drunk in any way, or, in many cases, aware of who the old-time stars were who would pop in for “cameos” that no doubt got very big reactions back when the Orgy was playing for an audience steeped in old movies (thanks to repeated TV showings) and, most likely, drunk or stoned to the gills. (Dante has noted in interviews that he and Davidson did strike a deal with Schlitz beer, who had the compilation shown at various colleges with free beer given to anyone in attendance.)

So, given this more “reverent” than knowing crowd reaction, the film was indeed really wonderful for the first two hours, then seemed to move at a slower pace in the third and fourth hours (as the B-movie scenes lasted longer onscreen and more of their plots was offered), only to become wonderfully insane again in the last 45 minutes, as all the B-movie monsters seen earlier on finally met their terrible fates at the hands of the innocuous, nearly anonymous, heroes and heroines who defeated them with scientific know-how (or just a lotta dynamite).

The Orgy was clearly the creation of movie-crazed minds, so it initially seemed to not have a “point” other than sheer pleasure. As it moves on, though, one becomes aware that it is a wily deconstruction of 1950s American mores through the lens of a Nixon-era sensibility. (If that wasn’t apparent, not one but two of Nixon’s most famous pre-Presidency moments were included to be mocked by audience members, although none of that happened in this screening.)

On the whole, despite the overwhelming nature of the film and the absence of an interactive audience (although one gent was laughing up a storm at various points), I’m glad I saw Orgy — actually titled “Son of The Movie Orgy” in this digitized version prepared by Dante himself — as it truly is a piece of “incredibly strange” movie history. It also, like every film mash-up, from the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it edits in Chuck Workman’s montages of movie scenes to Godard’s masterpiece Histoire(s) du Cinema, makes the cinephile try to i.d. each sequence. (Orgy is very easy to figure out; Godard’s history of cinema requires additional research.)

And thus, some clips to convey what Orgy is about, and to spotlight some of the best “finds” in this stew of clips. First, an interview with Dante, who explains how the project came about, and how he brought it back to life in this century. 
Then a “trailer” for the film, which includes a glimpse at one of the oddest items in the whole thing, a film made by the British sketch comedy group The Establishment (to be shown in the nightclub of the same name). Peter Cook narrates (he owned the club), Eleanor Bron is the nurse, and Jonathan Miller (who was a doctor in real life) plays the surgeon. It's also been officially noted that the short film proper doesn't exist in the U.K. any longer, so this might be your only chance to get a glimpse of it. It begins at 2:10.

 

A quicker trailer shows the opening montage of movie stills, which definitely places the compilation in the late Sixties. (It’s like a film student’s crazed version of the Joe Franklin opening montage.)

 

One of the biggest boffo moments in the whole 4:45 came when an episode of “Andy’s Gang” appeared. A strange children’s show for any era, the series starred Andy Devine and Froggy the Gremlin, plus a little “band” comprised of taxidermied animals engineered to look like they were making music (decades before the Survival Research Laboratory!). This did completely crack up the Anthology audience.

 

Another sequence that did put the AFA audience into hysterics is this old classic. I loved Abbott and Costello as a kid but have had little impulse to rewatch their movies as an adult (not so with Fields and the Marxes — who are both in Orgy, and Laurel and Hardy). But the “Susquehanna Hat Company” routine has always made me laugh out loud. (And the end is the height of vaudeville anarchy as the shop owner takes an axe to his own goods.)

 

The most curious inclusions in Orgy — one could easily call them “spoilers” indicating the era that it was made — were the three instances of newer clips that were inserted. One already mentioned was the Establishment short film (seen in two fragments, one being a mock ad for the Labour party and the other being the operation sketch). Another was a closing “Thought for the Day” dispensed by a young priest whose Christ is falling off his crucifix and has to be reattached with a staple gun (reportedly a student film made by another student at the Philadelphia College of Art). 

The longest example of this is one of my fave clips, Funhouse favorite and interview subject Robert Staats giving the pitch for the “Fabulous Judeo-Christian Good Guy Kit” in Harry Hurwitz’s The Projectionist (1971). Staats is of course wonderfully funny (although the AFA audience laughed sporadically, as some of the quicker lines were darker ones that hint that the kit is only for those who *don’t* want to be actual good guys…). Dante and Davison not only show the mock-commercial in its entirety, but they keep Hurwitz’s follow-up: various images of Heaven culled from old movies. (Hurwitz was one of the all-time masters at incorporating vintage Golden Age footage into his nostalgia-drenched comedies.)

 

The piece de resistance in terms of the opposite of the above, real commercials that seemed ridiculously ill-conceived, was a Bufferin ad campaign with the tagline “strong medicine for sensitive people.” The sensitive people include a Black social worker having to relocate an old White couple; a mother whose husband is going a “Great Santini” number on their son, trying to make him macho with the gift of a rifle; a draft board member who has to deal with a small business owner (Dolph Sweet) begging him to not draft his only young worker; and a college administrator who is dealing with teenage protesters on his campus. 

The campaign is a stunner and, according to Dante, only ran once (or was shelved entirely after being shot and edited). It remains an amazing concept and a definite link to the late Sixties.

 

The other clip that was a humdinger but is sadly not online was one of those Art Linkletter moments where you realized that his humor was just as sadistic as Allen Funt’s (actually more so). Hosting a “stunt” game show, Linkletter tells us they found a woman with a phobia for mice. He’s going to ask her to reach into a box of rats to fetch a 10-dollar bill. The lady is brought out and is very disturbed by the prospect of rats brushing by her hand; she turns the offer down. 

Linkletter increases the money amount over and over until it reaches $100 and the lady agrees to reach in the box. At this point Linkletter, who has been holding a magician’s box with no back, moves it as if the rats are trying to leap out of the box toward her — but the “rats” in question are just pads over which a woman’s hair is arranged (called “rats” back in the ‘50s). We the audience knew this all along, and in classic sadistic game show fashion, the studio audience is laughing up a storm over the woman being in terror of rats. (Maury Povich’s “Phobia!” episodes thus had a precursor — and, again, Art L. is shown to be a devious guy [who of course hated hippies, blaming them for the death of his daughter, a story that the original Orgy viewers surely knew].) 

The most interesting thing about researching this piece was that I discovered one viewer who saw a longer cut of the Orgy stating two themes that were cut from the version I saw: the annoyance of child actors (conveyed through a montage featuring a plethora of kiddie material that Dante and Davison had access to) and the repetition of a slur for Japanese people that reflected the fact that movies of the Golden Age of Hollywood did have a harsh underside — conveyed in the version I saw by a clip where an upper-middle-class woman mocks her Black maid to her husband. 

Perhaps the way to get audiences in the 2020s to react like those in the ‘60s and ‘70s would be the most obvious one — provide them with free pizza (Dante notes over and over again in interviews that people would bring munchies to the showings of the film), CBD gummies (for a contemporary audience), or free liquid stimulants. (Schlitz not necessary.) 

Some info contained in this piece (esp. the identification of the newer pieces that weren’t made by Harry Hurwitz) came from a 2015 thesis on the film by David Ruane Neary that is posted online.

Saluting the centennial of Norman Mailer

Mailer in "mad
scientist" (filmmaker)
 mode.

Norman Mailer's centennial was this past Tuesday. While he's now thought of by many as a “dinosaur” because of the many incidents of him acting up in public (and private), Mailer was, above all, a great writer. His Executioner’s Song is perhaps the finest bit of “new journalism” ever (although it wasn’t as fun as Thompson or Wolfe, and did indeed work from a formula set down by Capote in In Cold Blood). It’s an incredible book that offers a very pointed and precise view of the American 1970s, as well as a compelling study of sudden violence and its aftermath.

His pure fiction varied from work to work — highs and lows, masterpieces and duds. But his journalism and essays are invaluable studies of American political and popular culture. Yes, he was a well-educated white Jewish urban intellectual who set out to write “the great American novel” and instead became a bad boy in the media and wound up saying some things he later renounced or rethought. 

Still, the passion he had for the written word still comes through in his work and his finest books (including Executioner’s, Armies of the Night, his writings on Kennedy and Ali, Harlot’s Ghost, and his last, The Castle in the Forest) will remain brilliant, whether or not people can bring themselves to read them because who he was is no longer fashionable. As has been noted often: if you search for pure virtue in the artists you enjoy, you’re going to have to get rid of the work of all the extremely talented and extremely fucked-up writers, musicians, filmmakers, fine artists, and performers.

Since Mailer’s books are all copyrighted and available wherever one consumes the written word (if one does consume the written word for more than 50 pages these days), I will run through his media image below, based on videos I posted to YouTube in the weeks after his death. This is not a thorough, or even a fair, representation of all that Mailer truly represented, but he did have some wild (and I do mean wild) moments in the media, and so one has to include the “wired” (by adrenaline, booze, or uppers) side of Norman as well as the philosophical one.

Casual Norman,
by Diane Arbus.

Mailer directed four movies, three of which were his attempt to make “underground” films and the final one — well, that’s the amazing Tough Guys Don’t Dance. I will start out with the one time I wanted to impart some of Norman’s thoughts so badly that I sat and typed out — yes, with mine own fingers! — a fragment from his article on television called “Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots.” 

It’s a late 1970s piece in which Mailer remembers watching Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs in the 1950s while high on pot and realizing that he understood what was really going on, on the boob tube. It’s an odd article, combining profundities about the “never well-done” medium and Norman revealing the polymorphous perversity in American society. 

The segment I wanted to share with the world is a vision of watching Steverino high on pot and meditating on what the women in the studio audience thought of having a big old microphone stuck in their face. It’s something that only Norman could’ve come up with. You can find the blog post here. 

Now, let’s go to the movies! First off, there was Mailer’s gangster drama Wild 90 (1968), which is, to be simple about it, a mess. As fine a writer as Norman was, he was ill-suited to the art of filmmaking. Firstly, in his Sixties trio of films he strived to emulate the off-kilter visuals of the experimental directors on the American “underground” scene, but he also wanted to have plots and characterization. Mekas and Brakhage could do the former, and Cassavetes and Clarke the latter, but no one could successfully do both. But Norman tried, three times, and in each case he allowed the actors to improvise — in the case of Wild 90, the whole film is nothing but Mailer and two of his buddies playing pretend-gangsters, quite awfully. 

Making this stew of insanity even better is the fact that Norman wore a boxer’s mouth guard while in-character to presumably make himself sound tougher. This made him hard to understand — and then the sound didn’t get recorded properly. The great D.A. Pennebaker was behind the camera, so the film looks striking in 16mm b&w, but Bob Neuwirth recorded the sound and fucked some of it up very badly. The official ratio quoted online is that “25%” of the sound is murky, but the whole damned thing sounds dreadful, and so it was subtitled for its release in the Eclipse box set of Mailer’s experimental films. 

So, why should you watch this little compilation I made of my favorite moments from the film? Because it’s amusing, but not in the way Norm and his two friends intended. Instead, we have tough guy Mailer using odd abbreviations like “the fyooch” (future) and “cock suck” (you know). The film is an absolute mess, but the scene where Norman tries to scare a growling dog is, again, just wonderfully crazy.

 

Mailer’s second film Beyond the Law (1968) was more ambitious and had some scenes that actually work (thanks to a cast of pro actors, including Rip Torn and Marsha Mason). His third (and last for a long while) film is the monumentally misconceived Maidstone (1970). 

Much has been said about the fight between Norman and Rip Torn, but the whole film is a stunning miscalculation — down to the very fact that Mailer expected his actors to come up with their own dialogue and for one team of performers to devise an assassination plot to kill his character. If you’re going to ask actors to improvise, you had better be Cassavetes or Mike Leigh behind the camera, because otherwise the results are going to be dreadful — but, luckily, Maidstone is saved by its (unintentional) humor. 

Case in point: a scene where Norman tries to seduce one of his exes by humming along with the radio and then attempting some scat singing (or whatever you want to call what he’s doing with his mouth). 

I saw Mailer’s experimental films in theaters more than once (yes, I’m devoted to high art *and* low trash), and one of my treasured memories is seeing Maidstone at the Thalia with my father. He stared laughing out loud when Norman started doing his humming noises in the film, and I had to caution him that Norman was in the theater and would probably come over and deck us one. (Years later, Norman chastised an Anthology Film Archives audience I was in for laughing at Rip Torn shaking his little hammer at the camera in the film.) Of course, I then began laughing and we both had to try to stifle our laughter while Norman continued his very special method of charming a lady.

 

In the years since I scored bootleg DVD-rs of Mailer’s three experimental films, the Eclipse box set did come out and provide us with unblemished copies, looking and sounding as good as these films possibly could. However, I will link to one more of the scenes I uploaded because it comprises what came after the infamous fight that Torn and Mailer had. Their impromptu insults of each other are sublime; Rip’s charge that he’s giving Mailer an ending for his film is entirely correct — and his coronation of Mailer as “king of shit” is a nice ad-lib. (Norman resorts once again to the “cocksucker” label.)

 

Pennebaker served as a cameraman on all three of the Mailer “undergrounds,” and he later captured a more vibrant Mailer in his film (assembled years later by his collaborator-wife Chris Hegedus) Town Bloody Hall (1979). Mailer’s 1971 article on feminism (which became the book Prisoner of Sex) annoyed feminists and so a gimmicky event was staged: Mailer would debate “the feminists” onstage at Town Hall in Manhattan. The result was a thorough mess but (again) a fascinating one. Some of Mailer’s verbal points were brilliant, but his manner was overbearing. The feminists ranged from the articulate (Germaine Greer, Sontag and Ozick in the audience) to the unbearable (Jill Johnston). 

Here, Norman is backed into a corner when forced to discuss his male protagonists and their penises.

 

Mailer stayed away from film for more than a decade and a half, but returned to it when the notion of adapting his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance came up. The book is a taut little thriller with a classically Mailer-esque overlay of meditations on violence, masculinity, and confusion over identity. The screenplay he spun off it was a weird creation — the plot is the same as the novel, but he ginned up the melodrama, at some points to be taken seriously, at others to be intentionally over the top. 

He then was given the opportunity to direct the film from those purveyors of crap action-flicks who desperately wanted to be taken seriously as producers of arthouse material, Golan and Globus. The result is one of those films that was destined to have a cult from the moment it was released — a weird amalgam of intentional humor and really ridiculous melodrama, all overlaid over a noir plotline infused by the spirit of David Lynch, via music by the late, great Angelo Badalamenti and the Blue Velvet queen, Isabella Rossellini. 

There are dozens of imminently quotable lines of dialogue and some startlingly bizarre line readings: “How could you dig Big Stoop?” “Your knife… is in… my dog,” “Deep-six the heads,” and my personal fave (when O’Neal is asked how dealing drugs went), “I couldn’t get that heavy shit to flush.” It’s an incredible film that is entirely linear, unlike Norman’s Sixties experimental films, but the tone varies so often that one can’t help but be enthralled by its alien charm. 

My only encounter with Mailer was when I went up to him as he exited the subway at 53rd and Third Avenue. I noted I really enjoyed (no lie, that) Tough Guys Don’t Dance. He then asked quickly, “The book or the movie?” I said (again, no lie), “Both.” He then informed me that the movie had been nominated for several awards (these noms were for the Independent Spirit awards). I had no immediate questions at hand, and he did have a cagey, energy-filled bearing about him, so I just shook his hand and said goodbye. (Yes, Norman rode the subway from borough to borough.) 

Mailer was clearly aware the film was a hard sell and so he had this trailer made, where he read a series of audience reaction cards from preview screenings — which, I’d be willing to bet, were all written by Norman himself. The final one paves the way for his last novel, The Castle in Forest, in which an emissary of the Horned One narrates the tale of the young life of an Austrian named Adolf.

 

And because I really do have an abiding respect for Mailer the writer and thinker, here is a segment I posted from a French documentary that I believe hails from the late ‘90s. Mailer speaks about plastic and how it became the emblem of American society (part of the “triumph of the mediocre”). He then links that to a deadening of the senses and the American proclivity toward violence. When Mailer was feeling expansive in interviews and wasn’t playing a pro-wrestling heel (as he did on the infamous episode of “The Dick Cavett Show”), he was one of the great thinkers of the late 20th century.

 

And finally a montage I put together for the Funhouse TV show: Norman on Merv Griffin (as seen in that French documentary) physically in his “heel wrestler” persona, but eloquent as ever, noting how curse words used by authors couldn’t ever compete with the obscenity of the then-escalating Vietnam War. 

Then it’s back to Town Bloody Hall, where he is again argumentative and in full “heel” mode but does make some valid points (esp. how Germaine Greer was truly a unique figure in the feminist movement, as she acknowledged the fact that men were not leading happy lives as well — plus she was incredibly witty, which always helps selling one’s point of view). His last-minute joke about his dick is classic Norman in media mode: undercutting his own sincere and well-thought out words with a rather feeble verbal joust. 

From there it’s back to Tough Guys… for two sublimely high-key sequences (including the film’s most stunning moment, shown on the Funhouse TV series in the ‘90s every few months). In closing, it’s Norman on C-Span2’s “Book Talk” in 2001. He laments the dumbing-down of American culture. “We’re a country that hates questions that take longer than 10 seconds to answer.” (Yes, this was during G.W. Bush’s tenure in the White House.)

 

No matter what becomes fashionable in the world of academic endeavor as the years move on, I think that readers who encounter Mailer’s writing will be jolted by it, in the intellectual sense of that word. When Norman was speaking clearly and precisely he was an American sage, a gent who understood the internal workings of this nation like few others. 

Specific utterances by him or his donning of the “heel” persona in certain public spaces may continue to make for snap judgments among those who are triggered by anything controversial, anything that makes them uncomfortable (which is, let’s be honest, just about all complicated thought and the context that necessarily underpins complicated speech). Mailer challenged that, and I point you back to the clip above where he compares his least favorite synthetic material (plastic) and its similarity to p.c. speech. 

“America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.”

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….

The annual viewing of Robert Vaughn mocked by clowns (A Thanksgiving ritual)

I have introduced this clip for nearly 30 years now, on the Funhouse TV show (which celebrated its 29th anniversary back in September of this year) and also on this blog. This year, we have emerged from on-again, off-again lockdown status to be where most of us knew we’d be back in 2020 — just getting on with our lives, with COVID sticking around basically forever, as plagues brewed up by man are wont to do. 

America’s economy is in a mess, there are various forms of crime on the streets, and people are diverting themselves at this minute by discussing a social media platform as if it is the end-all, be-all of human communication. The proxy war (between light-skinned foreign people) isn’t as news-worthy as it was, so pundits are busy wondering if the 2024 presidential election will simply be a do-over of 2020, with two deranged, empty old white guys battling it out. Our Gerontocracy = No. 1! 

Surely, the only way to deal with the abovementioned problems is to simply bask in the holiday glow of the former “man from U.N.C.L.E.” being mocked by clowns as he reads the U.S. Constitution at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1986. By this time, I’ve seen it so many times I begin to simply look at the clowns rather than the rapidly-more-irritated Big Bob V. Watch as someone in the studio tries to “save” him by putting his head in the upper corner of the image and showing us a different image in the center of the screen. 

If anyone knows anyone who worked on the shoot for this parade, or who can tell us how angry Vaughn was when the segment was over, please get in touch. In the meantime — enjoy!

Media Funhouse guests speak about Godard

It’s been a few weeks since Uncle Jean (aka Jean-Luc Godard) died, and I do plan on writing something about his life and work for this blog. But in the meantime, I wanted to post what I initially thought of as “the end” of the piece, namely a collection of eight videos in which Media Funhouse interview subjects spoke about Godard. Two of the guests were admirers who happened to meet Godard as their indie filmmaking careers flourished; two were performers in his 1980s films (commonly thought of as his “comeback” films, although he never really left — he just stopped and then restarted making fiction films); three were collaborators behind the camera; and one wrote the first (and still best) biography of Godard in English.

I should explain that these interviews were done under various conditions. In some, I spoke to the guest under very tight time constraints, so my Godard-related questions were slipped in “under the wire.” In others we had ample time with the guest and so they could go on at length about their admiration for, or work with, Godard. The interviews were shot in conference rooms, hotel rooms, a Lincoln Center office, and one artist’s kitchen. I was very happy to get these responses about a filmmaker that clearly fascinated the interview subjects as much as he fascinated all of his diehard fans for the last six decades-plus, and I’m now happy to share them all in one package. 

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As an “appetizer,” two clips from different interviews with Hal Hartley, where I asked him about Godard and his influences. He had interviewed Godard for a U.S. filmmaking magazine and had the great experience of telling Uncle Jean that he went to one of Godard’s recent films with his actor-friend Martin Donovan, who “laughed at the wrong part” of the film. Godard’s answer? “There are no wrong parts.”

I used that as a springboard for an earlier question to Hartley in the ’96 interview and then slipped in a query about Godard before the end of the chat. In ’06 Hartley answered the question in a broader sense, discussing how important it is for filmmakers to have influences and to openly copy them, on the way to developing one’s own style. 

Leos Carax is one of the most talented directors around, but few know about his acting career. There hasn’t been much to it (six supporting roles of various size in films directed by others) — then again, his filmmaking career has consisted of only six (splendid) features so far. 

He made his acting debut on film (minus a bit as an extra in one of his own pictures) in Godard’s KING LEAR (1987). I asked him about his appearance in that film and also about his being influenced by the French New Wave.

 

Next up is Jane Birkin. Ms. Birkin acted only once for Godard, in SOIGNE TA DROITE (Keep Your Right Up, 1987). She had a small part, but I thought it was still important to ask her what that time spent with JLG was like, and she came up with a lovely portrait of a cranky, laser-focused man with a bad cold. (None of which should surprise a diehard Uncle Jean fan.)

 

Independent filmmaker Amos Poe discussed his paean to Godard, UNMADE BEDS (1976), in my interview with him. That film revolves around a guy in ’76 NYC who believes he’s living in a French New Wave movie at the turn of the Sixties.

That part of our chat was interesting, but an even juicier morsel came out later in our lengthy interview: Amos had been ripped off money-wise by Uncle Jean! Watch the clip for details, but the story involves Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Robert Fripp, and a proposed remake of ALPHAVILLE.

 

The filmmaker Claude Miller served a long and fruitful apprenticeship assisting other directors in the 1960s. He was as an assistant director or production manager for Bresson, Truffaut, Demy, and Godard. I got reflections from him on three of those four, and here is his remembrance of time working with Godard on 2 or 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (production manager, and he’s also seen as an actor behind a pile of books on a table in one sequence), LA CHINOISE (no official credit, but he said he worked on the film to me), and WEEKEND (assistant director).

He had fond memories of working with JLG, and he certainly was present at a great moment in Godard’s career — when he was making his “last” fiction films, before he went fully political (and non-fictional) for a decade.

 

D.A. Pennebaker was a consummate documentarian who shared quite a lot in my discussion with him, reviewing his older films while also promoting his more recent ones with his partner/wife Chris Hegedus. His time with Godard was spent making (with his partner Richard Leacock and Uncle Jean) a Godard project called 1 A.M. (ONE AMERICAN MOVIE). It was to be a sort of panorama of America on the brink of revolution, but Godard left the project after most of the footage was shot and abandoned the whole thing.

What Pennebaker edited together, called ONE P.M., does play like one of Godard’s “pitch” storyboards (drawn so he could get a notion of what he wanted, but also to cajole money out of producers). It’s a series of unrelated episodes, some documentary, some fiction: Rip Torn acts up a storm around NYC, Eldridge Cleaver is seen being wary of the filmmakers’ cameras, Tom Hayden gives lengthy speeches, and the Jefferson Airplane beat the Beatles to the punch by having a rooftop concert months before LET IT BE. (And getting chased off by the cops.)

In the meantime, we see Pennebaker’s footage of Godard staging and shooting some of the scenes — it’s by far one of the closest studies of Godard at work in the Sixties. Even though he’s not making a classic film, you can still see his imagination (and budding interest in radical politics) radiating all around him.

 

The last two interviews featured here gave me the most information about Godard as an artist (and as a person, although Birkin’s remarks can always be kept in mind). Cinematographer Caroline Champetier, who worked with JLG for a number of years on every project he did, from fiction features to video essays, provided some excellent insights about his working methods. Here we talk about her first film with him, SOIGNE TA DROITE, where she was behind the camera filming Godard as an actor (playing his “Uncle Jean” character – this time called “The Prince”).

She also rebuffs the notion that he was a master of lighting and instead calls him a “master of framing,” detailing how his very specific methods of framing an image made his visuals so distinct and readily recognizable.

 

And finally: The only full-length interview I did that was entirely concerned with Godard was with film critic and historian Colin MacCabe, whose biography “Godard: Portrait of the Artist at Seventy” had just been published. (The first biography in English and, as I said above, still the best one in this language.) When I spoke to him in early 2004, a lot of Godard’s “late period” films had yet to come out on DVD (and there was no such thing as the “underside of the Internet” where rare foreign films with English subs were lurking, ready to be grabbed and watched).

I had seen Godard’s film and video work of that time at select screenings at rep houses and (mostly) MoMA, so I was able to talk about it with Mr. MacCabe, but I wasn’t sure if my viewership had, so I spoke with him here about Godard’s perception of his audience and how one should watch his brilliant eight-part sensory overload, HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (made from 1988-98). 

Mr. MacCabe, who had not only interviewed Godard many times and wrote the biography but also produced three of his video essays, was quite generous with his knowledge of his subject and gave me some very valuable answers about how to take in the essays, which are indeed the masterworks of the last three decades of Godard’s career (along with a few of the final fiction films). This is part of a much longer chat.