I didn't make it to the end of this thing. Didn't make it to halfway point even. I only saw Norman Mailer, Buzz Farbar and Mickey Knox, but I see on imdb.com that there's a larger cast. Maybe it really took off after I turned it off.
For some reason Norman Mailer was credited as director and cinema verite filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker was listed as writer.
Reportedly, Norman Mailer and his friends had fun hanging around in bars pretending to be in the Mafia. Mailer thought it would make a terrific movie. So he called up Pennebaker. They went into a loft Pennebaker rented for some reason but wasn't using. They sat around improvising.
The results were awful. It could really use subtitles. The sound was terrible.
In this age of video cameras everywhere, when anybody in theory could make a movie, this should either be a great inspiration or deeply depressing.
You don't have a video camera and a couple of friends who could sit around either pretending to be criminals or playing slightly fictionalized versions of themselves for an hour and a half (it was called "Wild 90" because it was ninety minutes long)?
And this thing was part of the Criterion Collection. I wanted to see it before Filmstruck goes kaput on the 29th.
Cost $1,500 in 1967 (about $11,000 today.) But now it could be done for the cost of charging your camcorder battery.
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