Isegoria

I can’t believe I never heard of Naked Came The Stranger before:

Newsday columnist Mike McGrady was convinced that standards of literary and artistic taste were plummeting rapidly in the United States, driven down by a relentless flood of media sensationalism that catered to the lowest common denominator. So he decided to design an experiment to test the depths of the American cultural morass. He would commission the writing of a novel lacking in any redeeming features: no plot or character development, no social insight, and definitely no verbal skill. It would possess only one feature that could possibly hold a reader’s attention: lots of kinky sex scenes. In fact, it would have a minimum of two sex scenes per chapter (which sounds a bit low by current standards). If the book was a success, it would prove that the American public completely lacked all standards of taste.

The plot of the novel, such as it was, involved a suburban housewife who hatched a plan to sleep with all the married men in her neighborhood in order to get back at her husband for having an affair. McGrady recruited twenty-four fellow Newsday staff members to help him with the writing. Each of them took a separate chapter. They gave the resulting hodge-podge the suggestive title Naked Came the Stranger.

The book went on sale in 1969. It was heavily promoted and given a sexy cover featuring a naked woman. McGrady’s attractive sister-in-law was enlisted to play the role of the book’s fictitious author, Penelope Ashe. She played it to the hilt, appearing in interviews wearing low-cut dresses and crooning phrases about the joys of sexual liberation.

To no one’s surprise, the book sold well. But soon some of the collaborators began to feel guilty about the money they were making from the deception and leaked the story to the press. The resulting publicity, of course, just made the book an even bigger seller.

(Hat tip to Reason‘s “Hit and Run” article, Return of the Naked Stranger.)

David C. Smith’s A Critical Appreciation of Conan the Barbarian cites Quentin Tarantino making an excellent point in an interview with Dennis Hopper:

As far as I’m concerned, the minute you kill your bad guy by having him fall on something, you should go to movie jail. You’ve broken the law of good cinema.

Every Disney villain dies by falling, right?

The Barbarian Keep introduces A Critical Appreciation of Conan the Barbarian with these words:

Presented here is one of the most interesting and in-depth articles ever written on the film, Conan the Barbarian. This article is well researched, informative, and best of all … insightful. Using the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as the framework for his exploration, David C. Smith exposes the central, overarching themes that has made Conan the Barbarian an enduring classic and one of the best heroic fantasy films yet made.

By all means, read the whole essay.

An Un-Funny Valentine describes how a printing error turned an amusing cartoon character into…what most old cartoon characters, like Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, always looked like:

Somehow, boxes of SpongeBob SquarePants Valentine’s Day cards are popping up in local Wal-Mart stores — but the popular cartoon character found inside isn’t his traditional yellow color.

He’s black. And with his trademark big teeth and wide eyes, this SpongeBob seems similar to offensive images of African Americans portrayed in minstrel shows decades ago.

Rotten Tomatoes interviews Eli Roth about his film, Cabin Fever:

At the end of the 1970′s, horror films were written around the basic premise: what is horrifying? By the end of the 1980′s, horror films were written around the premise: how can we kill this group of kids?

The movie’s genesis scares me:

The initial idea for Cabin Fever came while I was working on a horse farm in Iceland when I was 19 years old. I had been cleaning out a barn and got a skin infection on my face. I woke up in the middle of the night scratching my cheek, thinking I had a mosquito bite. I looked down at my hand and saw chunks of skin. The next morning I attempted to shave and literally, shaved half my face off. The strangest part was not only did it not hurt — it actually satisfied some strange itch underneath my skin. I went to see a dermatologist, who, judging by the horrified and puzzled look on her face, had never seen anything like it before. She gave me steroid creme and luckily, my face cleared up.

The Joy of Gore interviews Eli Roth, writer/director of the horror film Cabin Fever, Lions Gate’s highest grossing film of 2003:

Nobody wanted to make it so we had no money. We made Cabin Fever for a million and a half dollars. Last Samurai was made for 170 million. Master and Commander was 150 million. It was literally made for one hundredth the cost of the big blockbusters. But once it was made [the distributors] were all fighting for it.

When you’re making a movie, it’s an abstract idea in your head. So, you hope first of all that the movie turns out well and then you hope that people like it. It’s an incredible thing to be literally told by eveybody you’ve ever met — these so-called professionals — that your movie won’t work and that no one wants to see it. Everybody. I just knew they were wrong.

I saw how much money low-budget horror movies make and knew that you can make the movie for a million bucks. You don’t need stars — you need good actors. It doesn’t have to have slick production value. It can be well crafted and well made.

Any time you make an independent movie, there’s no guarantee it’ll ever go anywhere other than a shelf. It was a scary thing and it was pretty incredible to risk everything on a project. But I knew it would work. I just knew that there was such a void of low-budget, really violent horror movies that were fun.

I could have sworn I’d seen Behind the Music: Aerosmith multiple times, but I just saw it for the first time today. A few things I didn’t realize:

• Joe Perry came up with the guitar lick for “Walk This Way,” and Steven Tyler, playing around on the drums, immediately came up with the drums to go with the guitar — but he couldn’t think off any lyrics to go with the music. Then the band took a break and caught a showing of Young Frankenstein. When Igor (“No, it’s prounounced eye-gor.”) said “Walk this way,” they had their lyric.
• I knew that the band broke up when their drug use got out of control. I didn’t realize that when they finally got back together again and started fresh, with a new producer and a new manager, they were all still on drugs. Their new manager did eventually get them all off drugs, but it took years. Then he started micro-managing their lives, and they fired him.

When I looked up Young Frankenstein Trivia on IMDB, I found a few amusing items:

• When Victor finds his grandfather’s private library, he finds a book titled “How I Did It.” This is actually a joke for those people who have read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the book, Frankenstein, Shelley never reveals how Victor reanimated dead flesh. The screenwriter obviously knew this and inserts the “How I Did It” book as a joke.
• The original cut of the movie was almost twice as long and was considered by all involved to be an abysmal failure. It was only after a marathon cutting session that they produced the final cut of the film, which both Wilder and Brooks considered to be far superior to the original product. At one point they noted that for every joke that worked, there were three that fell flat. So they went in and trimmed all the jokes that didn’t work.
• The experiment the medical student mentions, where Darwin preserved a worm in fluid until it came to life, is mentioned in Mary Shelley’s foreword to the novel “Frankenstein”. The Darwin in question was Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin.

When I read Frankenstein in college, no one else in class noticed that Shelley never explains how Dr. Frankenstein creates the monster. In fact, everyone thought I was crazy for suggesting that it was left to our imagination. They all “knew” the monster was sewn together from corpses.

The more I see and hear about Sky Captain, the more I think it’s right up my alley. From Mr. Invisible and the Secret Mission to Hollywood:

Set in 1939, the movie stars Jude Law as the daring flying ace Sky Captain, who teams up with his former flame, the intrepid reporter Polly Perkins, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, as they track down a mysterious mad scientist named Totenkopf. It is in part a nostalgic homage to the movies of the 30′s and 40′s: the hammy fisticuffs and golly-inspiring proto-technology of sci-fi cliffhangers like ”Flash Gordon” alongside the snappy patter (and even snappier clothes) of the era’s noir thrillers.

I may have to try this:

But like the old serials it emulates, ”Sky Captain” is mainly preoccupied with the strange promises of the future. The astonishing things you will see in the world of tomorrow include: an immense, silvery zeppelin docking at the Empire State Building; an elephant that fits in the palm of your hand; a troop of giant robots marching down Sixth Avenue and the carpet at Radio City Music Hall. None of these things actually exist, though. Conran has not constructed a single set or miniature. Rather, they are computer images, built and animated in a virtual 3-D environment, or stitched together from photographs, which are then draped around the flesh-and-blood actors, who have been shot separately on an empty set in front of a blank ”blue-screen” background, along with those few minimal props with which they actually interact (a ray gun, a robot blueprint, a bottle of milk of magnesia). The film, in other words, is one long special effect with Jude-Law-size holes in it.

”The goal was to make a live-action film, but to use conventions of traditional animation,” Conran said. The reason? ”First and foremost, to do it cheaper.” It’s a model that would appeal to anyone who, like Conran, does not seem entirely comfortable spending other people’s money; to anyone who might dream of shooting in Nepal or Paris (or in the 1930′s) but doesn’t have the means to get there; to anyone who is shy.

For Conran, the question, as he put it, was ”Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?” And so 10 years ago, Kerry Conran went into a room in his apartment to make a movie. In some ways, he is just now beginning to come out of it.

[...]

He realized he could build whatever he wanted, and what’s more, it could be gigantic. Rockets that dwarfed skyscrapers. Airplane hangars so large that you could not see someone on the other side. Because, he explained, ”what does it cost to hit the scale button and make something enormous? Nothing.”

And it didn’t matter whether the actors were on a big expensive sound stage or in Conran’s tiny apartment. By 1994, he had struck upon the idea of filming an entire movie by himself, at home, with a blue screen set up right in his apartment. He began to create what he was calling ”the World of Tomorrow.”

If I may geek out for a moment, this sounds awesome:

Together, Kerry and Kevin [his brother] filigreed the film with cathedral-like touches that only they and the angels will see: the ship that carried King Kong in the 1933 movie, lying on the ocean floor; a line of deactivated robots, leaning against a wall in the exact same positions the Fleischer brothers had them in their moody 1941 Superman cartoon, ”The Mechanical Monsters.”

Yesterday, I noticed that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was playing on IFC — and since I knew that Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay, I had to finally watch it. Ebert’s own quasi-review, “written for Film Comment magazine on the occasion of the movie’s 10th anniversary in 1980″ expresses my feelings fairly well:

Remembered after 10 years, ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’ seems more and more like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum.

If you’ve ever watched it — or tried to watch it — you’ve probably asked, how did this get made? Ebert explains:

At the time Russ Meyer and I were working on BVD I didn’t really understand how unusual the project was. But in hindsight I can recognize that the conditions of its making were almost miraculous. An independent X-rated filmmaker and an inexperienced screenwriter were brought into a major studio and given carte blanche to turn out a satire of one of the studio’s own hits. And BVD was made at a time when the studio’s own fortunes were so low that the movie was seen almost fatalistically, as a gamble that none of the studio executives really wanted to think about, so that there was a minimum of supervision (or even cognizance) from the Front Office.

We wrote the screenplay in six weeks flat, laughing maniacally from time to time, and then the movie was made.

In some sense, Meyer’s vision comes through:

Meyer wanted everything in the screenplay except the kitchen sink. The movie, he theorized, should simultaneously be a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick and a moralistic expose (so soon after the Sharon Tate murders) of what the opening crawl called “the oft-times nightmarish world of Show Business.”

Ebert did seem unusually prescient in one respect:

The character of teenage rock tycoon Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell, for example, was supposed to be “inspired” by Phil Spector — but neither Meyer nor I had ever met Spector.

Z-Man goes on a murderous killing spree at the end of the movie — a few decades before the real Phil Spector.

Before that spree, the movie’s almost unwatchable. In fact, I stopped watching it and came back later, when things more than picked up:

But the last hour has a real kinetic energy, and the scenes beginning with Z-Man’s psychedelic orgy and ending with his death are, I must say on Meyer’s behalf, as exciting, terrifying and dynamic as any such sequence I can remember. That stretch of BVD is pure cinema, combining shameless melodrama, highly charged images of violence, sledgehammer editing and musical overkill. It works.

Ebert hardly mentions the awful, awful epilogue, with it’s not-quite-funny moral message, shared with us via voice-over.