Jason Mann still plugging away

I poked around the internet to see what Jason Mann was up to, to see how he was faring years after the nightmare of Project Greenlight. Found a reel of his work as cinematographer. He's trying to find work doing that. He's clearly from a wealthy family. If he could feign enthusiasm for very low budget film he could be a major figure in that field. I searched his name and his old addresses came up. I looked them up on Zillow. People have made pretty good movies for what he pays in rent every month.

The premise of Project Greenlight was that Matt Damon and Ben Afleck were boy geniuses perfectly suited to discover geniuses like themselves and get them started in the movie business.

You know, Sylvester Stallone wrote the script to Rocky in just a few days and it was a far bigger hit than Good Will Hunting. You think HE should have gotten a show like this?

Early Robert Downey Sr on The Criterion Channel

I don't know how he parlayed his early underground films into a middling Hollywood career. Robert Downey, Sr, made a number of absurdist underground films in the 1960's, some of them just under an hour long. They LOOKED interesting, in black and white 16mm, but the content wasn't serious or funny although I think he wanted them be both.

In one movie (No More Excuses) he stole Buck Henry's gag and briefly shows a guy calling for animals to wear clothes in the name of public decency. That movie threw in a random rape scene, then the rapist turns out to be a priest. I understand why people target the Catholic Church---it's the largest single denomination in America---but Downey is Jewish. Attacking Catholicism doesn't necessarily make him an atheist. He needs to make at least a token attack on his own religion if he's trying to be anti-religious and not just a terribly rude Jew.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Young Noah Beery, Jr

You know "Rocky" from The Rockford Files? He was fifteen years older than James Garner but played his elderly father.

Knowing him only from that show, it came as a shock to see him at 22 playing a Tarzan-like ape man in a serial, The Call of the Savage (1935). He was born in 1913.

You can recognize him. He was in pretty good shape.

Available on Pub-D-Hub. 

Tom Hanks, propagandist

From https://www.spyculture.com/

Billy Jack, 1971

It's easy to make fun of now. A 1971 youth film about young pacifists at the Freedom School protected from violent rednecks by Billy Jack, a former Green Beret Vietnam veteran who hated the war. There's cultural appropriation. Obviously white actors play Indians. They weren't even Italian. They'd put a headband on a Caucasian and now she's an Indian.

Bernard Posner hates his wealthy father who dominates the town. Bernard might have been friends with the hippie kids at the Freedom School if he hadn't been a racist and a serial sex offender. Perhaps an important lesson for the kids. Hating your father is not enough.

It predated the wave of kung fu movies in the early '70's. They used Korean Hapkido master Han Bong-Soo as Tom Laughlin's stand-in in some of the martial arts scenes.

Rather conservative in some respects. Right off the bat, a pregnant teen condemns free love and the local sheriff is a nice guy and a friend to the young.

On the other hand, I don't think you'd see a movie now with the hero shooting it out with police. 

I did a search on Roku and found only one streaming video channel that had it.

Derek Jarman's Edward II (UK, 1991)

When he was working on the script to Ben Hur, Gore Vidal realized that Masala (Stephen Boyd) needed a more plausible motive for his actions.

The movie starts with Masala and Ben Hur reuniting in Palestine after Masala had been away for years. They have a ninety second argument about Palestine and the Roman Empire and Masala spends the next thirty years persecuting Ben Hur and everyone in his family.

Vidal figured that Masala and Ben Hur had been teen lovers. When they meet again, Masala wants to continue the relationship but Ben Hur's not interested.

Vidal told Stephen Boyd this and that's how he played the scene. They were being subtle. So subtle that Charelton Heston had no idea what was going on.

Of course, there was no reason for Derek Jarman's Edward II not to be blatant about it. Edward and Gaveston reunite while two naked men with crew cuts are going at it in bed a few feet away.

The anachronisms in Jarman's Caravaggio a few years earlier seemed weirdly natural. Edward II was in modern dress on minimal medieval sets. One was clearly wearing polyester and Edward's son wore what I think was a cotton-polyester blend. Now the fashions are 30-years-old which makes it worse not better.

It was far bloodier with a lot more torture and murder than I expected. I didn't know anything about Edward II in history but I shouldn't have been surprised. As with Caravaggio, I didn't really have any feeling about the characters except that I would never want to be around any of them, but, realistically, how appealing should they have been?

I had my own brush with period drama in modern dress nearly half a century ago. I was in the fourth grade. A girl in my class wanted to put on a play. It was only about two minutes long based on a story we read in one of those terrible primers---those books we used to practice reading. 

A princess is looking for a husband. Some noblemen come in giving her expensive gifts, but she decides to marry the one who was either a peasant or a down-and-out aristocrat who brings her some worthless crap. We were Americans. I don't know why they wanted to make royals look sensitive.

We did the play in the classroom. The set consisted of a chair. Maybe two chairs. But the director wanted the boys to wear tights and white undershirts to represent medieval finery. I thought my regular clothes were good enough and would have refused to change in any case. She drew a mustache on me. I would have gone with a pencil thin mustache like Errol Flynn, but she just drew hairs on my lip, like a teenage mustache.

It was the early seventies. Even children's clothing was somewhat Mod. I was wearing these pants that were a shade of purple---flairs that were cut in such a way that they required extra sewing---and a button-down shirt with an ornate striped pattern. It was timeless.

Years later, a friend of mine was in a Shakespeare play in high school. A (different) girl did the costumes for it. He was playing a wrestler and it may have been both functional and historically accurate, but his leather codpiece got a big laugh when they did a preview at a school assembly and he refused to wear it again.

The Executioner (Spain, 1963) Luis Garcia Berlanga director

A dark, dark comedy. 

It reminded me a little of Ida Lupino's The Bigamist. Through a complex set of circumstances, a young fellow is forced to do something no right-minded person would agree to. 

Good-looking young Spaniard Jose can't find a girlfriend because of his job as an undertaker. He's hired to remove the body of an executed criminal from the prison. He and his partner give the executioner a ride home and he meets his daughter who can't find a man because of her father's ghastly occupation.

Soon, the couple has to get married. Because the bride's father is retiring, the only way they can keep their apartment is for Jose to get a government job as an executioner himself which he really, really doesn't want to do. 

If you're willing to do it, you only have to work a few days a year. There are a couple of executioners in the movie and they seem like nice guys. 

We learn that Spain under Franco executed prisoners by strangulation with a garrotte. The older man argues that this is far better than America's electric chair or the French guillotine. Even now, Arizona is "refurbishing" its gas chamber, preparing for executions.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Make it a double feature. Watch it with Season 1 Episode 32 of Bonanza, "Death at Dawn" (1960). The Cartwrights blithely take it upon themselves to execute an especially obnoxious prisoner (Gregory Walcott) after the sheriff is killed. The episode is public domain so it shouldn't be hard to find.

Ned Beatty, RIP

Ned Beatty passed away this morning at age 83.

The first thing I remember seeing him in was White Lightning (1973). I didn't realize it then, but my sister had some sort of crush on Burt Reynolds. She had already seen the movie a number of times and I went with her and my brother to see it yet again at the drive-in. Ned Beatty played the corrupt sheriff. 

Some years later, when I was in high school, it was summer and it was very warm. A friend asked me if I was hot.

I said, "Baby, I'm always hot," quoting or at least paraphrasing one of Ned Beatty's lines from Silver Streak. 

My friend reacted much like the woman Ned Beatty's character was hitting on in the movie.

Glen or Glenda (1953) now in color

Enough time has passed. I think we can admit now that colorization was a boon to mankind. The problem was that they were colorizing movies that didn't need any help.

I watched Edward D. Wood, Jr's, Glen or Glenda in color and it was beautiful. Just beautiful. It still looked very old fashioned. It was made in 1953 but looked much older to me. 

When I watched Reefer Madness with some marijuana users, they were laughing mirthlessly at it, but now and then one of them would stop.

They are actually right about that, one of them said. You really shouldn't drive under the influence.

In the case of Glen or Glenda, Ed Wood was right. Why pick on the transgendered? What did people think they were laughing at when they watched that movie?

Available on Pub-D-Hub if nowhere else.

 

Jeffrey Toobin back in action

A man of his wealth could have resorted to a name change and plastic surgery. It's amazing that Jeffrey Toobin even WANTS to make a comeback, but he's back on CNN. Not much to say about it, I guess.

When this thing happened, others on the Zoom video chat saw what he was doing but said nothing. You might give some thought to what you should do in that circumstance.

You could pretend not see him and say something like, "Say, is Jeffrey still here? Hey! Jeffrey! Can you hear me?" I don't know if he'd hear your voice and realize he was still on or if it would falsely confirm to him that no one could see him.

You could just say, "You okay there, Jeffrey?"

He might have quickly pulled himself together and said, "Yes, I'm fine, thank you." 

Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

 

Low budget by Hollywood standards, but big budget for Russ Meyer. I can't find my copy of it now, but the author of a book on cult films was disappointed by it. He had admired Russ Meyer's work for years, thinking that if the poor guy had just had some real money to work with, he could make some truly great movies. But then he did get some money and he made a spoof of Valley of the Dolls which was a joke to begin with. I can see what he meant.

 

The script was by Roger Ebert. You can watch the movie with his commentary on the Criterion channel. He said that Meyers told him that his biggest influence was probably Lil Abner, the hillbilly comic strip, and I can see that. He was described somewhere as a "rural Fellini". I don't know if this movie, set in Los Angeles, was out of character for him if if it was what he always wished he could do.

During the Vietnam War, George Lucas was encouraged to go into the military, or at least to not fear the draft. As a film school graduate, he would be made a cameraman and would get a lot of very good training and experience. Which was terrible advice. So many cameramen were killed in Vietnam that once you were in, they wouldn't let you leave. One guy signed up for three years and was there for seven. Lucas lucked out and was rejected for being severely diabetic.

But this was where Meyer got his training, in the Army Signal Corps in World War Two. 

"This is my happening and it freaks me out!" enthuses the host of a large party at his mansion. That got the first big laugh from the college crowd I saw this with forty years ago.

An all girl rock band goes to L.A. They hang around with rich people. There are hippies, Lesbians, a man who turns out to be a woman, a Nazi; the singer's new boyfriend beats up her old boyfriend, and I'm not giving anything away when I tell you there's a horrible mass murder. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but this was from the mind of Roger Ebert who was later outraged by the relatively sedate slasher movies of the '80's. Quite a bit of nudity.

The Deadly Companions (1961) Sam Peckinpah

I've known the name Chill Wills since I was about six. My family lived in San Antonio for a couple of years and Wills made an appearance at a shopping center. My mother didn't know about it. She just happened to be there with my brother who was 2-years-old. Wills picked him up, saw that he didn't like it and put him down immediately and went on with his appearance. I doubt anyone remembers it but me.

This is the first movie I've seen Chill Wills in and he was better than I imagined in a supporting role. I guess I thought he would be sort of a cross between Denver Pyle and Dub Taylor, but he was pretty good.

This was Sam Peckinpah's first movie, just one year before Ride the High Country and five years before The Territorial Imperative was published. It wasn't exactly a Sam Peckinpah movie. He had to follow a script he didn't write and it wasn't overly violent. Maureen O'Hara disliked him. She thought he couldn't direct. He forgot to film an entire sequence vital to the movie, he killed a snake for one scene and it says somewhere that he kept walking around scratching himself.

The music was bad. I never really liked Maureen O'Hara. I never really liked Brian Kieth either, but I liked him in this. Steve Cochran smiled too much as a gunslinging rapist preying on a bereaved mother. Strother Martin was sort of repellent in a small role, but being sort of repellent was his thing. Billy Vaughan as Maureen O'Hara's son.

Everyone hates each other in this thing. I was rooting for the poor Apaches.

Available on Pub-D-Hub and Amazon Prime if nowhere else.

The Thing (1982) John Carpenter

I didn't expect to like this. I probably saw a clip of it long ago and thought it was too well-made to be a horror movie. Too smooth, too well lit. I don't know. I avoided it for years, but now I've watched it and it was great.

With Kurt Russell and Wilford Brimley.

Available now on The Criterion Channel.

Cruising (1980) Al Pacino, directed by William Friedkin

I had these friends in high school. It was the weekend and one of them told me they wanted to go to a movie. I said I was going to a Marx Brothers movie playing at the university. He smirked like he had far more sophisticated tastes than I did. He and this other guy, Ed, wanted to see Cruising. I vaguely remember being aware of the controversy around it at the time, but I don't know how much I knew about it.

So I went with them. There were police cars parked outside the theater as we walked up.

"Free shotguns!" Ed quipped. The unattended police cars had shotguns mounted on the dashboards.

The girl at the ticket counter warned us there were no refunds. People had been walking out and demanding their money back.

"We can always just blow the place up," Ed said. It wasn't as good as his first joke, but it was normal for him. The girl froze and Ed had to ask her for his ticket.

I was a bit of a naif. There were things in the movie I didn't understand at all. Al Pacino goes undercover to find a serial killer preying on gay men frequenting New York leather bars. It seemed about the same as other excessively gritty police movies they made back then. The cops were subhuman. A lot of scenes with dead bodies and pieces of dead bodies in a morgue and police brutalizing suspects. I had no feeling one way or the other about all the gay stuff. 

I still have no idea why my friends wanted to see it. Maybe they wanted to see a lot of gay content in what was regarded as an anti-gay movie. It gave them plausible deniability.

The film stopped in the middle and everyone had to leave the theater. We milled around outside for a bit then were ushered back in for the rest of the movie.

When it was over, Ed went to the men's room before we left. As he tried to leave, a cop blocked his way.

"Uh, excuse me," Ed said.

The cop said he heard that he made a little joke back there on the way in. It was good he recognized it as a joke.

The cop wanted to see ID. Ed had a driver's license, but he showed the cop what was left of his school library card which had gone through the wash. The cop let him go.

I can't remember what we did afterward. The other guy observed that making jokes about blowing up a building when there were police cars outside was ill-advised. There had obviously been a bomb threat. Usually Ed was the smart one.

The movie is now available on the Criterion Channel.