Jon Reiss has been a pioneer of DIY film-making since the punk era and he shares what he’s learned in his new book, Think Outside the Box Office: The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution and Marketing for the Digital Era
Amusing clock by artist Chris Dimino:
Every hour Jack breaks through the door and the and the famous line ‘Here’s Johnny’ plays followed by the scream of Shelly Duvall.
(via Nerdcore )
Somebody re-created the entire Wicker Man movie with the muppets, and made a flip-comic out of it. It’s about 500% better than the Nicholas Cage remake, I’ll give them that!
This is an episode of Post Mortem, a series that examined the “pathologies” of certain seemingly doomed artists who were touched equally by genius and madness. Other subjects included Beethoven, Virginia Woolf, Francis Bacon, and Nijinsky. This episode, about Montgomery Clift features interviewees like Kenneth Anger, Clift biographer Patricia Bosworth. Kevin McCarthy, and Barney Hoskyns.
The company who made this, Blackwatch Media, also produced the excellent Carry On Darkly documentary about the troubled personalities behind the iconic British Carry On film series of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Carry on Darkly is well worth looking for on the torrent trackers. I enjoyed it immensely.
Thank you Paul Gallagher!
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the cinema… there’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror, which I maliciously tricked Jason Louv into seeing last night. But what I didn’t know—why would anyone know this?—is that James Nguyen, “The Master of the Romantic Thriller”™ who, uh, created Birdemic, actually directed an earlier movie in 2003 called Julie & Jack.
I haven’t seen it—and seriously doubt that I ever will—but apparently, Julie is actually dead and her brain and personality are stored in a computer. This is what Jack is all upset about. Apparently. (Note that actress Tippi Hedren is in both of Nguyen’s movies).
When I was looking for a photo to run with this post in the L.A. Times photo database, the caption for the above shot of Malcolm McDowell as the perverse Roman emperor Caligula read, ” ‘Caligula,’ with Malcolm McDowell as the ruler, shocked audiences in 1980. Now it seems just unpleasant.” That was from a review of a 2007 DVD release. Not a good one, obviously!
Many of those associated with the film, including screenwriter Gore Vidal and actors Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and McDowell, wanted to distance themselves from Caligula but especially director Tinto Brass, now 76, who railed against the film’s producer, Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione, for adding what Brass thought were “gratuitous” hard-core sex scenes. But now, inspired by the success of James Cameron’s billion-dollar Avatar, Brass wants to revisit the subject of “an abandoned project about a Roman emperor that was ruined by Americans,” implying he wants to do a remake of Caligula.
From The Guardian:
It remains to be seen whether Brass’s dalliance with 3D technology will spark excitement in other adult film producers. Thus far the porn industry appears to be adopting a surprisingly coy approach to the new medium, scared off by the high production costs. Added to this is the fact that most pornography is produced for the home-entertainment market, where viewers will need 3D TVs in order to enjoy it behind closed doors. “We’re very excited to do 3D production,” Rob Smith, director of operations at the Hustler Video Group, said recently. “But we don’t feel market penetration [of 3D TVs] has hit the level we need.”
The sad news for Brass, meanwhile, is that 3D technology is not quite the virgin territory he thinks it is. Other pornographic film-makers have been there before him, with 1969’s The Stewardesses widely credited as the first 3D adult movie. Shot on a budget of $100,000, this sensitive account of footloose cabin crew went on to earn a tumescent $27m from porn cinemas around the globe.
While it does seem rather obvious that 3-D pornography could help lead the beleaguered adult industry toward better days, the whole concept of a big-budget Caligula in 3-D — remember all the puking? — seems deliriously misguided. Production is due to start in Italy sometime in May.
Cross posting this from Brand X
Song: “Angel” by Massive Attack
The Letter (1940, William Wyler. Bette Davis)
The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston. Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor)
Shadow Of A Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock. Joseph Cotten)
Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder. Barbara Stanwyck, Fred Macmurray)
Murder, My Sweet (1944, Edward Dmytryk. Dick Powell)
Scarlet Street (1945, Fritz Lang. Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett)
Laura (1945, Otto Preminger. Gene Tierney)
Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulhmer. Ann Savage)
Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman)
Gilda (1946, Charles Vidor. Rita Hayworth)
The Killers (1946, Robert Siodmak. Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster)
The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks. Humphrey Bogart)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, Tay Garnett. John Garfield, Lana Turner)
The Lady From Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles. Rita Hayworth, Welles)
Out Of The Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur. Jane Greer, Robert Mitchum)
Brute Force (1947, Jules Dassin. Burt Lancaster)
Force Of Evil (1948, Abraham Polonsky. John Garfield, Marie Windsor)
The Set-Up (1949, Robert Wise. Robert Ryan)
The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed. Orson Welles)
Criss Cross (1949, Siodmak. Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo)
Gun Crazy (1950, Joseph H. Lewis. John Dall, Peggy Cummins)
In A Lonely Place (1950, Nicholas Ray. Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame)
The Asphalt Jungle (1950, Huston. Sterling Hayden)
Night And The City (1950, Jules Dassin. Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney)
Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder. Gloria Swanson, William Holden)
Ace In The Hole (1951, Billy Wilder. Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling)
Angel Face (1952, Otto Preminger. Jean Simmons)
Pickup On South Street (1953, Samuel Fuller. Richard Widmark)
The Big Heat (1953, Fritz Lang. Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich. Gaby Rodgers)
Night Of The Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton. Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish)
The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick. Sterling Hayden)
Elevator To The Gallows (1958, Louis Malle. Jeanne Moreau, Maurice Ronet)
Touch Of Evil (1958, Orson Welles)
The Naked Kiss (1964, Samuel Fuller. Constance Towers)
(via HYST)
Directed by Tamra Davis, the documentary features never-before seen footage of the prolific artist painting, talking about his art, and existing in the two years prior to his death in 1988.
The OST features music from Mike D and Ad Rock.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child was released on Feb 21st.
Thanks Manuel Hernandez!
It seems like I often write about the topic of bad movies here on Dangerous Minds. Good bad movies, not bad bad movies. Nobody likes a movie that’s just plain terrible. A good bad movie has to have that something special, like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Santa Claus vs. The Martians, or The Room. Or just about any Elizabeth Taylor film after a certain point.
And then there’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror, which I posted about earlier. Tara and I went to see it with Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin this weekend and I must say, Birdemic truly lived up to its good bad advance hype. It was bewildering, but hilarious. Tim and Eric’s Tim Heidecker, co-host of the screening we saw on Saturday night, stared out at the audience when the film was over and after a dramatic pause, asked “Don’t you all just feel like assholes for sitting through that?” In a sense he was right, although Heidecker admitted this screening had, in fact, been his fourth.
I was telling a friend today about the dubious cinematic charms of the utterly perplexing Birdemic and he asked me had I ever seen Gymkata
I’ve seen Gymkata three times. That’s not a boast. The first time I caught it was on videotape in the late ‘80s. The second and third times it was on some late night cable station and I was either too sleep-deprived or inebriated to turn it off. I know it’s cliché, but the whole car wreck analogy fits almost too well. When Gymkata is on, I just can’t turn away. And I’m not alone - - the net is littered with sad accounts of similarly affected individuals.
Jonathan Cabot (Kurt Thomas) is a U.S. gymnast sent to the backwater country of Parmistan to participate—and hopefully win—The Game, a dangerous, obstacle-laden decathlon. Why? Because the U.S. government needs to set up a “Early Warning Earth Station for the Star Wars program” and sending in troops to do it is “out of style.” Indeed. Thing is no one has survived The Game in 900 years. There’s a reason for that, too. As if the course weren’t hard enough, contestants must maneuver through numerous ninjas, crazies, and Parmistani thugs that try and stop them.
A cheap plot description can’t do justice to the inanity on display here. Perhaps descriptions of a few choice sequences will: the film’s crowning triumph is the Village of Crazies, an entire hovel populated only with cannibal psychopaths and screaming schizos who try and claw our hero from the sky as he swings and vaults through the decaying town. What, that’s not crazy enough? How about the fact that there just happens to be a convenient pommel horse in the center of the town?!? Still not doing it? How about clumsy ninjas wearing fur vests? Or a guy named Thorg with a red headband and silver He-Man arm braces? Honestly, I could go on and on.
Did you catch the part in the trailer where he just happened to have the gymnastics horse to fight the baddies with? How does that get explained?
Not sure I could sit though this one. Yes, I’ll watch the movie with the poorly animated CGI birds that shit fiery bombs, but even I have standards.
Gymkata on iMockery
Thank you, Scott Dallavo!
Here’s a short animation using the real audio of David Lynch recalling his first meeting with George Lucas. It didn’t go so well.
(via Mister Honk)
Dangerous Minds pal Michael Simmons reviews When You’re Strange, the new documentary about The Doors from director Tom DiCillo (Johnny Suede, Living in Oblivion) on the Mojo blog:
DiCillo’s hardest task has been to do justice to the charisma of Mr. Mojo Risin’ (one of Jim Morrison’s many handles, in this case an anagram of his name); I saw The Doors live in January 1969 and can attest that Morrison glowed, generating tangible heat. And yet, 39 years since his death, the Morrison magic comes through loud and clear, as the film traces the transformation of 1965’s callow California kids into the jaded, burnt-out rock stars of 1971. Along the way, we witness every over-told incident in Doors history: Light My Fire and the subsequent string of hits, the adoration of trendsetters du jour like Andy Warhol, Morrison’s refusal to sell out - whether it be changing a controversial lyric for Ed Sullivan or selling a song for a car commercial - his increasingly self-destructive behaviour, the two books of poems published in his lifetime, the penis-flashing in Miami that never happened, and the poète maudit’s Parisian finale.
The musical contributions of the other Doors are emphasized, from drummer John Densmore’s deft swing to guitarist Robbie Krieger’s flamenco fingering and organist Ray Manzarek’s Bach mastery, serving to remind that there would’ve been no Doors without the other Doors. Morrison’s excellence as a singer is also noted, a fact often overlooked in the accounts of his antics. When he was younger, his vocal role model was Elvis; as he got older it was Sinatra and one can clearly hear Ol’ Blues Eyes’ in Jim’s caress of a note.
The footage feels fresh and intimate. There are clips of Morrison’s underground movie from his university days, a sweet Jim playing with children, fly-on-the-wall recording studio scenes, as well as the familiar live concerts where we witness Jim the consummate performer and Jimbo the inebriated clown. But it’s the shots lifted from Morrison’s own experimental films HWY and Feast Of Friends (the former the source of that Ford Mustang footage) that allow us entry into the omnivorous, risky, arty mind of the front Door.
Well, he’s actually purchasing LA’s New Beverly Cinema, which was once a grindhouse, but is now one of the city’s finest revival theaters:
“As long as I’m alive, and as long as I’m rich, the New Beverly will be there, showing double features in 35mm,” Quentin Tarantino told the Hollywood Reporter. He’s bought the 200 seat Fairfax District theater that has shown second-run double features since 1978 (Before that it was, appropriately, a grindhouse with live nude dancers, although it was built in 1929 and once showed first-run movies). In the mid aughts, hearing operator Sherman Torgan was having trouble keeping the doors open, Tarantino started paying the monthly expenses. After Torgan’s death in 2007, his son Michael took over operations, but the landlord had a buyer almost immediately. Since the Torgans had the right of first refusal, Tarantino stepped in, and after some extensive haggling made a deal to buy the theater.
Well, that’s great news for LA, but if the New Bev can find its white knight in Tarantino, surely someone else both “alive and rich” can step in and save the Bodhi Tree?
(via Curbed)
A huge collection of films by “other cinema” pioneer Lutz Mommartz is available at the Internet Archive. Music in the first clip is by a group called The Iceni about whom I can find no further info. Anybody ?
Maybe NSFW. Definitely uh, hot…
thx Tara !
“I’m perfect, but nobody in this shithole gets me, ‘cause I don’t put out!” So snarls Diane Lane’s Corinne “Third Degree” Burns in that great undersung grrrl-group movie from 1980, Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. And that’s just one of many memorable lines in a film that manages to stitch together an immensely satisfying, angsty whole from such disparate elements as the Tubes’ Fee Waybill, LA’s late great (and equally undersung) Black Randy, and, as a Sexy (but babyfaced) Beast in leather, British actor Ray Winstone. Oh yeah, and it’s got Laura Dern, some Sex Pistols, and The Clash‘s Paul Simonon in there to boot.
The hero in all this—mine, anyway—is screenwriter Nancy Dowd, who, in a mere three year span, put her fingerprints on not only the Stains screenplay, but the ones for both Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and George Roy Hill’s Slapshot.
But despite her Academy Award for Coming Home, Dowd fought sexual harassment on the set and later struck her name from the picture. Fortunately, Dowd’s given her due in the wonderful find below. Made to coincide with the film’s 2000 VHS release, it’s a two-part Split Screen documentary on the making of LAG, TFS. Check it out, then, if you haven’t already, go check out the movie.
Master archivist of music from the depths of oblivion and WFMU DJ/ blogger Tony Coulter has been unearthing these delightful early 70’s homemade 8mm art/ psychedelic drug/ comedy films as of late. I have a feeling this is the tip of the iceberg for this kind of stuff as the baby boomers have fully taken to the youtubes and the facebooks and are presently posting the contents of their closets for all to see.
Orson Welles has been back in the news lately. First British director Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Brideshead Revisited, Let it Be, The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus) will be taking a paternity test to either prove or disprove that he is the only son of the famed director. Lindsay-Hogg is writing an autobiography and wants to put the matter—which has dogged him his entire life to rest one way or the other. Welles’ daughter, Chris Welles Feder has recently published her autobiography, In My Father’s Shadow
Lindsay-Hogg’s mother was the Irish actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, a star of the Broadway stage who appeared in Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and died in 2005. Married to Sir Edward Lindsay-Hogg, she had begun a relationship with Welles in America during his marriage to Chris Welles Feder’s mother, the Chicago-born actress Virginia Nicholson. The families continued to live side-by-side for some time and the two children became close.
“My memory is that nobody knows for sure whether Orson was Michael’s father. My mother told me that even Geraldine Fitzgerald didn’t know,” said Welles Feder.
And then there is this new documentary, which is a must-see in this Welles-obsessed household. From the Wellesnet website:
In Prodigal Sons, we discover that Welles second daughter, Rebecca, the child of Rita Hayworth (beauty) and Welles (brains), actually had the grandson Welles would have been happy over, but apparently never knew about! Marc was quickly put up for adoption in 1966, shortly after he was born.
The family who adopted Marc were the McKerrow’s of Montana. The father was a doctor (like Welles’ own guardian, Dr. Bernstein) and the mother, a schoolteacher (like Roger Hill). Later Mr. and Mrs. McKerrow had two sons of their own, Paul and Todd.
Paul becomes an accomplished athlete, who later shows an interest in movies, (including a love for the work of Orson Welles). Then, in a bizarre twist that no screenwriter could ever imagine, Paul decides to become a trans-sexual. As Kimberly Reed, she goes on to make movies, her most recent being this documentary!
Meanwhile, Paul/Kim’s natural brother Todd turns out to be gay. Of course while the three brothers, Marc, Paul and Todd are growing up, none of them know that Marc is actually the grandson of Orson Welles. Marc himself only finds out that his real mother is Rebecca Welles, shortly after Rebecca dies, and he then finds out the truth about his famous grandparents.
The ‘only son’ of Orson Welles to take DNA test (Guardian)
Prodigal Sons official website
Thank you, Steven Otero!
There’s not a lot of actual Frank Herbert footage floating around online. The below publicity interview, audio with pictures, hardly remedies that. It does, though, offer an opportunity to hear Herbert discussing Dune with David Lynch, director of the film version that nowadays seems equally loathed and loved. I tend to fall into the later camp. Script-wise, Dune the movie certainly plods, but there’s no denying Lynch’s visual achievement was as fantastic as it was faithful.
It’s always a happy thing to come across some hitherto unknown (to me, anyways) fragements of seriously demented vintage psychedelia. In this case it’s these clips from Pierre Clémenti‘s (shot in ‘67, released in ‘75) “Visa de censure no. X
(thanks Tony Coulter !)
Last month, while digging up some info on April Gaede’s new white-power matchmaking effort, I noticed Stormfront hosts a film review forum—an active one at that! Here are some snips from the What’s Your Favorite Racist Movie thread:
* You really need to watch “Birth of a Nation”. A 1915 movie that was so powerful that millions of White Americans joined the Klan. And the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson called it “history written with lightening”.
* All the ‘racist’ movies I’ve ever seen like Mississippi Burning always depict the whites as bad so I’ve given up watching them. The underlying message in these movies is always “Those evil Klan in the deep south are at it again and should leave the ‘innocent’ black man alone”.
* I’m not trying to flame here, but I don’t see how any pro-white person would like American History X. It was NOT made to make us look good. It was made by New Line Cinemas, total Jewish filth. I mean, they guy changed his beliefs, left “the movement”, betrayed his people in the end - what kind of message is that? And I know not everyone on here is a skinhead, but as a former byrd and somone who has mostly skinhead friends - that movie was a VERY inaccurate portrayal of what a REAL skinhead is. Real skinheads do not play coloreds for the right to a basketball court.
* Aliens [jew promoted race-mixing and the terrible results…]
* Tropic Thunder. Makes fun of blacks and retards!
* Blazing Saddles.
The Samuel Jackson 5 by artist Dave MacDowell.
