Boiling Sand

Los Angeles in the days of New Wave totally kicked ass:   The Police (including an impossibly young Sting) gigging at the upstairs bar of Madame Wong’s in Chinatown; Pee-Wee Herman developing his act at clubs on Sunset Boulevard; Andy Warhol snapping Polaroids of hipsters waiting on the street to get into Club Lingerie; future film score maestro Danny Elfman and his band Oingo Boingo playing on the Strip at the Whiskey à Go-Go; and on and on.

One of the best New Wave sounds came from the band Suburban Lawns.  Having that trademark New Wave Music quality of a pulsing beat driving short and sharply-crafted songs, the Lawns were one of the bands that helped cleanse the airwaves of the post-Beatle 1970s wasteland of bombastic Art Rock and tinny, rinky-dink Disco.

This was also the early days of accessible and portable video.  The introduction of 3/4″ videotape during that time was the bridge in the evolutionary liberation of alternative filmmaking, from the Post-War period when artists in New York and Paris were taking their 16mm cameras out into the street and making experimental films, to the introduction of the family camcorder that put the means of videomaking in the hands of Mom, Dad, Buddy and Sis. 

The leap from 16mm to videotape created a rush of immediacy:  movie-makers no longer had to wait for the film to be developed before they could see the results.  Editing went from physically cutting the film and cementing pieces together to previewing cuts on a TV monitor and pushing buttons.  Even the images had that sense of urgency because tubes in those early cameras (by their non-digital nature) had a blurry / smeary quality that — in retrospect — has a quality of paint being brushed on a canvas.

This video captures that rush.  Alternative videomaking still was a raw process; directors and cameramen were inventing techniques to compensate for a lack of even the most basic effects.

The previous generation of aspiring filmmakers took photographs with their still cameras, seeing what light and film could do.  The result saw an evolutionary leap in the visual texture of commercial films during the 1950s and 1960s.  In 1980, virtually the only accessible editing was straight cuts from one image to another with no ability to fade or dissolve images.  The result of filmmakers like Denise Gallant is the sophisticated editing language that has evolved over the last quarter-century.

For a Hi Rez version, you can contact the creative force behind this video at info@video4dvd.com.  In the meantime, savor some curvilinear sighs from the pre-pixel age…

Doug / PoMo Joan

Director Gregory LaCava left a far greater imprint on Hollywood history than just his chef d’ouevre MY MAN GODFREY.  A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, LaCava broke into the industry as an animator.  Soon he was recruited for William Randolph Hearst’s new animation studios where he adapted the Hearst Syndicate’s comic strip Katzenjammer Kids to film.  That comic strip — with its rebellious kids and big, dumb authority figures — created a template for LaCava to use in his comedies over the ensuing decades.

As LaCava segued to two-reel silent comedies and then to features, he directed a couple of early W. C. Fields movies.  LaCava and Fields became best friends and drinking buddies which led to the emergence of his second film motif:  alcohol and hangovers.  (It’s interesting that the German word “katzenjammer” — literally the racket of howling cats — is also slang for a hangover.)  His major sound films (such as FIFTH AVENUE GIRL, SHE MARRIED HER BOSS, PRIMROSE PATH, STAGE DOOR and of course MY MAN GODFREY) collectively displayed a world of clueless bluebloods, a smartass working class, personalized coping skills for hangovers, and characters suffering from the general unfairness of life. LaCava’s upending of the social order, irreverence for authority and a decidedly ‘morning after’ view of the world created some of the most jaundiced yet humorous examinations of the Human Condition that Hollywood ever dared to articulate.

Gregory LaCava’s 1941 UNFINISHED BUSINESS was an anomaly in commercial film production:  it was a misanthropic chick flick. 

The director’s work often declared the world was neither fair nor a meritocracy (Ginger Rogers’ college-educated dad ending as a low-rent suicidal drunk in PRIMROSE PATH; the ‘gifted’ actress Andrea Leeds losing a career-saving role to the less-talented and less-motivated Katharine Hepburn in STAGE DOOR), and most frequently explored this through the status of women.  UNFINISHED BUSINESS’ protagonist, Nancy Andrews (Irene Dunne), has sacrificed many of her ‘good’ years in a small Ohio town raising her kid sister (Kathryn Adams).  In the opening scene, little sis is married off (to future LEAVE IT TO BEAVER dad, Hugh Beaumont) and Dunne’s character — faced with the idea of quickly becoming a maiden aunt — declares “I’ve been settled down my whole life” and decides to take the next train to New York.  [An interesting historical footnote:  the year after this film was released the actors who were bride and groom -- Hugh Beaumont and Kathryn Adams -- were married in real life.]

Once on the train and sampling her first night of self-directed freedom, she is quickly seduced and abandoned by a playboy on the make (Preston Foster in a delicious, weasel-y Zachary Scott-type performance).  Things don’t get much better once in New York:  hoping for a career as an opera singer, she flunks her audition and resorts to a job singing “Happy Birthday” telegrams over the phone.  (This was lifted from Dunne’s own life.  After studying voice in her hometown of Louisville, she embarked to New York at twenty-one but didn’t pass her Metropolitan Opera audition, which led to her work in Broadway choruses.)  Eventually she meets the younger brother of the guy who seduced her, and after an evening of way too many cocktails, they are married.

Irene Dunne’s work with director Richard Boleslavski had brought out her strong talent for comedy and improv, which then advanced in her films with Leo McCarey such as THE AWFUL TRUTH and LOVE AFFAIR.  LaCava also frequently improvised on set, so Dunne’s gifts as an actress — with her trademark wry, word-playing, physically arch comedy — worked beautifully within the director’s worldview.

[Boleslavski's widow, concert pianist Norma Drury Boleslavski, played Cousin Nell in UNFINISHED BUSINESS.  It's a rare opportunity to see her face on film since usually only her hands were used in movies, providing the close-ups of actresses' fingers on the piano, such as Mary Astor's in THE GREAT LIE, or in dubbing the piano playing for stars such as Ingrid Bergman in INTERMEZZO.]

Becoming a character on the other end of the social scale from his Park Avenue millionaire performance in MY MAN GODFREY, Eugene Pallette plays the acerbic butler.  And the film captured yet another brilliantly dizzy performance by Walter Catlett (who played the befuddled Constable Slocum in BRINGING UP BABY).

The director, writer, star and several supporting actors re-teamed on the Universal lot a few months later for LADY IN A JAM, LaCava’s penultimate film.

Like many of LaCava’s screen characters, the gifted director surrendered his destiny to The Bottle.  Thirty years ago I attended a LaCava Q&A with the prolific and legendary producer Pandro S. Berman, the man who gave us everything from Bette Davis in OF HUMAN BONDAGE to Elvis in JAILHOUSE ROCK.  (Berman and LaCava had made six films together at RKO in the 1930s.)  Hoping to sober up LaCava and get his career on track, Berman had given LaCava what was ultimately his last credited directing job:  a 1947 Gene Kelly comedy called LIVING IN A BIG WAY (featuring another future LEAVE IT TO BEAVER cast member, Barbara Billingsley).  When the moderator, Myron Meisel, mentioned that the Kelly film would be screened next week as part of the director’s retrospective at USC, Berman addressed the audience and told them not to come see it, that it was a rotten movie. 

Despite the slam against his final film, I think LaCava would have enjoyed that remark for its irreverence, its repudiation of turning his movies into sacred cows, and its total lack of sentimentality.

Doug / PoMo Joan

P.S. — In good conscience, if you are curious about checking out MY MAN GODFREY (which, since falling into the Public Domain, has seen a market glut of quick-and-dirty, unwatchable, budget-priced DVDs of the movie), you should avoid all copies of the film except the luminously restored My Man Godfrey – The Criterion Collection disc.  I never knew what the big deal was about this film until I saw it restored.  Also, the brilliant commentary track is like a mini-course from a top film school.

The ultimate spoiled rich kid, Kim Jong-il, is also a wannabe movie maker.

In addition to being the national movie critic, he also wrote a Marxist book on the art of cinema.  From the sketchy information about Kim that has been gleaned from the other side of the Bamboo Curtain, he’s allegedly a big fan of Elizabeth Taylor and Godzilla.  His fixation on the second of these two movie icons led him to produce a movie called PULGASARI.

To be truthful, the backstory on PULGASARI is more interesting than its plot.  In a scenario straight out of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE Kim Jong-il ordered the kidnapping of a prolific and popular South Korean movie director — Shin Sang-ok — who was drugged and brought to North Korea.  (First, the director’s wife was abducted in Hong Kong; when Shin came to investigate he was taken too.)  Initially well treated, Shin was thrown in prison after an escape attempt, where he survived on a diet of rice, grass and salt. 

Shin was reunited with his wife — actress Choi Eun-hee — when both were granted an audience with Kim after more than four years in captivity.  According to The Guardian, the Dear Leader apologized to his captives for taking so long to get back to them personally, claiming he had been busy at the office. 

(North Korea officially denied the abduction but Shin’s wife, risking the firing squad, hid a cassette recorder in her purse during a conversation between her husband and Kim. That 45 minute Side A was broadcast on South Korea radio, blowing the story wide open.)

Eventually released from prison but not allowed to return home, Shin made seven films in North Korea with Kim Jong-il acting as executive producer.  The only one that has been widely available outside North Korea was his Kaiju (monster) movie, PULGASARI.

For this magnum opus, director Shin was able to bring in Japanese special effects honcho Teruyoshi Nakano (whose work included the amazingly cool GODZILLA 1985).  With a guarantee of safe return to Japan, Nakano imported most of his creative team, including the actor who worked inside Godzilla’s rubber dinosaur suit.

In the film, Pulgasari was a tiny figure crafted by a starving, imprisoned village blacksmith from his last mouthful of rice.  Brought to life with a drop of the blood of the blacksmith’s virgin daughter, Pulgasari became a metal-eating Godzilla-like monster who grew stronger and larger with every meal.  Although he helped the peasants in their fight against the oppressive warlords, he also impoverished them by his insatiable hunger for metal.  (Was the director slipping in some wry commentary on the film’s executive producer??) 

Aside from the cheesy synthesizer score, the most confounding element of the film is the lack of professionalism in the extras (and there are plenty of them).  The bit-players and spear-carriers are way too careless, imprecise and unconvincing for people supposedly trained under the guidance of a military dictatorship.  You’d think they’d be more focused and pro.

As for the fate of director Shin and his actress wife:  Kim Jong-il eventually trusted his creative team and began to dote on them (giving the director an annual salary of three million dollars, but nowhere to spend it).  In 1986 they were allowed to travel on business to Vienna where they eluded their North Korean guards (in a “Follow that cab!!” scenario straight out of a clichéd Hollywood feature) and sought asylum at the U.S. Embassy.

You can see PULGASARI here in a feature length, subtitled version.  Just click the PLAY button:

Doug / PoMo Joan

[This post was written in conjunction with the For the Love of Film:  The Film Preservation Blogathon this week.  Please DONATE to the National Film Preservation Foundation.]

The need for film preservation eventually reduces to a discussion of film stock.  It’s the effects of age and the unstable chemicals in the physical elements of film that cause cinema to be the most fragile of art forms.  Primary attention has been justifiably placed on the toxic, flammable and self-destructive nitrate stock of early film, which has caused many classics to turn literally to dust.  Yet I’d like respectfully to address the stock in wide use thirty years ago by non-Hollywood filmmakers:  sixteen-millimeter color reversal film. 

“Like the haunting formations at Avebury, Lewis, Stonehenge, those old images now please us while implying a logic whose order we’ve alas forgotten – and their preservation may be altogether more precarious,” as Ross Lipman wrote on 16mm reversal film in the Journal of Film Preservation.

The long-discontinued Eastman Commercial Original 7252 film stock (“7252″ or “ECO” as it was called by indie and student filmmakers during its availability from 1970 to 1984) gave the viewer more than a representation of skin tones; it seemed to embrace and exalt flesh itself.  Its warmly saturated, low-contrast palette plus its medium-grain emulsion worshiped the human body in a way that was not dissimilar to the sensual celebrations of 19th century French painting.  Its tonal reticulations celebrated the essential carnality of all genders, all races, all bodies.

To put it another way, sixteen millimeter film was the perfect medium for Pornography.

The creation of this medium during the Golden Age of Porn was a miracle of timing.  Sixteen millimeter filmmaking was already a sensuous affair:  the unexposed raw emulsion emitted a wondrous scent as it was removed from a film can, the tactile pliability of the film felt comfortable in the hand compared with the weblike threads of 8mm or the hearty bulkiness of 35.  The new movie film’s visual softness and warm colors augmented the voluptuousness of low-budget movies during the underground sexual revolution in America.  By the time of ECO’s demise, home video had transformed that movie scene and its aesthetics from underground to homebound.  The change in media also changed its look to a bluish tinge on images, delineated by the scan lines of a TV tube and eventually the cold micro-frames of pixels.

“Reversal film” such as ECO/72252 was movie stock that didn’t create a negative; what you saw was what you got.  “There is something lovely and elegant in the camera-original that, bypassing the negative, simulates directly the tones and colors of the world as seen to the eye,” again quoting Lipman.  In addition to the skin trade, independents and film artists gravitated to this filmstock since bypassing the motion picture negative step in filmmaking dramatically cut the cost of production.  Plus, artists were drawn to it for its wonderful visual aesthetics. 

[A beautiful example of a short art film shot on sixteen millimeter reversal film was Dan Curry's WAITING from the 1970s, which can be viewed HERE.]

Time has not been fair to 16mm films.  Their colors gradually fade due to unstable dyes in the original, and the mechanics necessary for positive-to-positive film generation has pretty much vanished.  The result:  marginalized / rebel / experimental works from the 1970s and early 1980s are disappearing.

If I had to choose one 16mm color film from the ’seventies for preservation, it would be Joe Gage’s L.A. TOOL AND DIE, a 1979 polysexual porn flick.  My rationale in this decision is not glandular, but resides in its historical and conceptual values.  The movie captured post-Vietnam fatigue and contrasted it to the desire for physical engagement.  [I should mention here that the film actually had a plot, as did most porn before home video when fast-forwarding knocked story content out of the genre.]  The film addressed sex as a healing process (the protagonist was a Vietnam veteran) and gave the audience this thesis:  if we as a culture had been more engaged in eager, consensual love-making, we might not have been so eager to go to war. 

The non-Hollywood, outisder films of that era are a bouquet of visual delights when screened in their original 16mm format.  I applaud those who work towards preserving them so others may experience their indulgent bliss.  You can make a donation to the National Film Preservation Foundation here.

Doug / PoMo Joan

On December 30th, 2009, the Library of Congress announced the next twenty-five films chosen for preservation in the National Film Registry, merited on their “enduring importance to American culture.”  On the list was the 1975 animated short QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO by Sally Cruikshank.

As the Library of Congress announced:

“Quasi at the Quackadero” has earned the term “unique.” Once described as a “mixture of 1930s Van Beuren cartoons and 1960s R. Crumb comics with a dash of Sam Flax,” and a descendent of the “Depression-era funny animal cartoon,” Sally Cruikshank’s wildly imaginative tale of odd creatures visiting a psychedelic amusement park careens creatively from strange to truly wacky scenes. It became a favorite of the Midnight Movie circuit in the 1970s. Cruikshank later created animation sequences for “Sesame Street,” the 1986 film “Ruthless People” and the “Cartoon Land” sequence in the 1983 film “Twilight Zone: The Movie.”

This was exciting news. I hadn’t heard a reference to the film in a quarter-century.  [One day during a lunch break on a location shoot in the mid-1980s, another crewmember brought up this film; that was my only chance to discuss it.]  Yet when I saw it the film made a great impression:  I came home and wrote down my thoughts about her work after the only time I saw it.  (According to my notes it was September 1, 1981, at the Nuart Theatre in West L.A.)  I had recently graduated from film school and was working at Disney Studios.  It was a time of searching and questioning what I wanted to do with all I had learned.  A lot of this quest included seeing lots of alternative forms of film:  Super8 Festivals, early features by Mark Rappaport, New Wave shorts by Chuck Straten, etc.  An Evening with Sally Cruikshank at the Nuart was part of that search for my idiom.

The evening was a two-part show of her own short films and cartoons that inspired her.  The latter works were mainly pre-Code, black-and-white surreal wonders of pulsating universes with elastic, bouncy beings and anthropomorphized objects:  Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat in FLIM FLAM FILMS (great name for a production company but I’d hate to be the person answering the phone), several Fleischer shorts (Betty Boop in IS MY PALM READ?, the hallucinatory BIMBO’S INITIATION plus the early Popeye short A DREAM WALKING), and a combination live action / animation short from Warner Brothers called YOU OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES starring Porky, Daffy and Leon Schlesinger.  (Are you getting the drift of her aesthetic?)

Cruikshank’s work was ahead of its time:  the color and design are far more like New Wave 1980s than Disco Seventies, as is its cut-and-paste PostModern sensibility.  (No wonder her work was used in major Hollywood feature films during the ‘eighties.)  Yet the tabletop aesthetic of these handcrafted films is very much a product of the pre-Yuppie, pre-Reagan era.  This is one of the most unshakable sensations of her works:  her means of production perfectly places the artist in her generation and the times she has lived in, yet her creative vision is still pushing the medium’s voice thirty-five years after this film’s completion.

To get a taste of QUASI, it can be viewed in low quality at YouTube — or you can go for the Gold and order her complete works on DVD from her website.

Doug / PoMo Joan

Under the leadership of Edward Muhl, the 1950s witnessed Universal Studios’ ascendancy from A-Notch-Above-Poverty Row grindhouse to Top Dawg moneymaker in the movie industry.  While other studios had a restrictive agenda to their films [M-G-M had its family values; Warner Brothers its social conscience; Paramount provided sophistication to the masses], Universal cut and pasted whatever was exciting in culture, framed it in successful genres, and amplified it to gave the audience a thrill:  whether it was a battle to the death between Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, Abbott and Costello mugging through yet another variation on “Who’s on First,” or showing teenage warbler Deanna Durbin getting her first screen kiss.

So when TV became the new cultural storyteller and the financial underpinnings of the studio system were dissolved by a few legal decisions, other studios panicked (e.g., in order to attract crowds, M-G-M killed off the ultimate symbol of their studio — Mrs. Miniver — in 1950’s THE MINIVER STORY*) while Universal raked in the cash by saturating the market with films like CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON in 3-D and Douglas Sirk’s operatic melodrama MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION.

A sharply packaged audience-pleaser such as THE LADY TAKES A FLYER is a perfect example of the satisfying-yet-disposable Universal product of that era.  This project was probably bumped up to a greenlight because a 1957 fire on Universal’s backlot would have made this an easy choice to go into production, since the locations are mainly interiors and airstrips.  (As the title implies, this is an aviation film.) 

The studio’s homegrown leading man Jeff Chandler was teamed with recently at-liberty Lana Turner (who had been dropped by MGM after more than 15 years at the studio).  Both amply supplied the screen with eye-candy.  The script had a narrative arc that cycled from “Meet Cute” (boy aviator meets girl aviator) to the ever-present 1950s glandular crossroads of sexuality versus domesticity, to a taught crisis-in-the-skies dramatic finale.  The result is a burstingly sensual yet Modernist look at a mid-American dream life circa 1958.

The MidCentury palette and design sense — when filtered through Universal’s culture machine — created an All American bourgeois Rococo confection; and though I label it as a ‘disposable’ movie (the intention of all films produced before film history appreciation developed in the 1960s), it has enough craft and significance to be enjoyed in multiple viewings.

Lots of its visual richness is due to director Jack Arnold and art director Alexander Golitzen.  Jack Arnold was a master of timing within a screen frame, having perfected balletic celluloid choreography by previously matching up actors and special effects in other Universal films such as TARANTULA and THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN.  He could place and move actors in a shot so the pace never stalled.  Russian refugee Alexander Golitzen (real name: Prince Alexander Alexandrovich Galitzine) received 11 of his 14 Oscar nominations for his work at Universal (from the chichi and splashy Technicolor delirium ARABIAN NIGHTS, to the jukebox neons of THIS ISLAND EARTH, to his Oscar-winning black-and-white work on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, finishing with the ’seventies disaster film EARTHQUAKE).  His design strategy in THE LADY TAKES A FLYER created a visual theme that resembled nothing less than a MidCentury version of scenes by the 18th Century Rococo master Jean-Honoré Fragonard in its choices of color and textures.

Producer William Alland had collaborated with Jack Arnold on a string of solid sci-fi films including CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, but this change of focus and tone worked just as well.  Alland repeated FLYER’s formula the same year with another good time-filler, RAW WIND IN EDEN, also starring Jeff Chandler and another refugee from M-G-M, Esther Williams.  This time — instead of Arnold directing — he brought in an old friend from his days with Orson Welles:  Richard Wilson.  (In his pre-producer career as an actor, Alland had played “Mr. Thompson,” the always-silhouetted reporter who interviewed the principals in CITIZEN KANE)

The year after THE LADY TAKES A FLYER Universal’s wildly successful double-header of binary-opposite hits, PILLOW TALK and IMITATION OF LIFE, gave Hollywood the brand and character to follow for popcorn cinema in the next decade.  FLYER doesn’t match those criteria, but — as concocted fluff that crystalizes the moment in which it was made — it’s a movie that gives many pleasures.

[*The death of Mrs. Miniver in THE MINIVER STORY is NOT a spoiler; she receives the news of her terminal illness in the first few minutes of the film.]

Doug / PoMo Joan