The Three-Night-Five-Ratings-Points-Palm-Exploding-Heart Technique

For as much as there have been thousands of words written in regard to the lifetime of hours that Quentin Tarantino has spent in a cinema seat, there should also be a significant amount of discussion about how many hours in his youth were spent with television, and his ability to distinguish and appreciate the details unique to that medium that would otherwise be in conflict with the theatrical experience. In multiple interviews, when discussing laudable moments of actors, he has frequently cited guest star roles on television on an equal level of praise as film appearances. His occasional forays into directing for TV, helming episodes of "E.R." and "C.S.I.," resulted in strong ratings and are cited as standouts of those series. And his recent blockbuster ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD spends more time addressing how it has been television rather than the movies that has made and could break Rick Dalton's career, as well as provide shaky foundation for the Manson acolytes' violent behavior. Most importantly, over-the-air television contributed to the budding cineaste's education long before VHS tapes and video stores were a viable option. In a 1992 interview with Michel Ciment & Hubert Niogret, he stated, "I just watched TV in my childhood all the time...during the weekend in Los Angeles, these old movies constantly played on TV all day long..."

Thus it's an irony that while his catalog has enjoyed plenty of cable and on-demand play, only one of Tarantino's feature films has ever been aired on free broadcast TV. Granted, the amount of language and violence contained within any of his stories would be a nightmare for the average editor trying to create an edition suitable for the FCC; when Miramax and Disney prepared such a cut in 1997 for a first-run barter syndication premiere, the Los Angeles Times' news story headline literally asked, "PULP on TV?" Their reedit eliminated most of the curse words, several lines of dialogue, and even eliminated The Gimp as a character, using strategic cropping of the 2.35 image to keep him offscreen. Not an optimum way to watch one of the most important films of a decade, to be sure. The whole situation likely was a love/hate moment for Tarantino - on one hand, appreciating seeing his own movie on TV the same way he consumed movies for years, but also having to see it severely altered the same way Jackie Gleason may have reacted to seeing himself confoundingly scream, "Scum bum," with someone else's voice in the 1979 NBC network premiere of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT.

A year ago, a slow ripple of shock made its way through several fandoms when Netflix began airing an expanded edition of Tarantino's 70mm epic THE HATEFUL EIGHT, broken into 4 episodes of roughly 50 minutes each. Talking to SlashFilm after its stealth debut, he detailed how the platform approached him about this alternate idea, and why he accepted. "[I] thought, wow, that’s really intriguing. I mean, the movie exists as a movie, but if I were to use all the footage we shot, and see if I could put it together in episode form, I was game to give that a shot....We didn’t re-edit the whole thing from scratch, but we did a whole lot of re-editing, and it plays differently...It has a different feeling that I actually really like a lot. And there was [already] a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this 'chapters unfolding' quality." He further elaborated, "Well if you like the movie, the movie is a movie, and I worked really hard [on it]. So even if I come out with a version that has more stuff in it, that doesn’t invalidate the first version...But now if you’ve seen that, and you like that, and you want more, this version gives you more…and it gives you more in a slightly different format...if you’re just watching it like a chapter at a [time], which is basically 50 minutes at a time, then you’re able to absorb it. And in a fun way, you’re able to look at it slightly differently. Do you want to keep watching it? You can, but you don’t have to. Each episode ends it an emotional place and you’re also able to see the whole original narrative complexity of the whole piece." Naturally, the question was raised if his other films would be revisited in a similar fashion, and while there were frequent musings that ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD could see an expanded episodic revision in the future, he stated that, "in the case of KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR, KILL BILL is the one movie I’ve made where everything I shot is in the movie..."

More than one critic observed the similarity between this reconfiguration, and the 1977 NBC presentation of THE GODFATHER SAGA. Seeking additional revenue to fund his expansive APOCALYPSE NOW, Francis Ford Coppola made a deal with Paramount and the network to create this hybrid blend of his two Academy Award-winning films, reedited in chronological order by editor Barry Malkin, and also including scenes that had been removed from each film. The four-night event was a ratings smash, and even drew rave reviews from those who had not cared for the theatrical editions: TV Guide's Judith Crist, who had panned THE GODFATHER in New York magazine saying, "The film is as ‘good’ as the novel; essentially immoral and therefore far more dangerous," said of the reconstructed miniseries, "[It's] a knockout...a brilliant editing job by Barry Malkin...he has come up with a gangster-oriented 'ROOTS'...the 'charms' of the Corleone family have been de-emphasized; we have instead a chronological study of the blood bond of the Mafia and, most particularly, of the father-to-son or don-to-heir transmission of character." The four-night event was a ratings smash, with NBC re-airing it in 1980, and holding onto the rights until 1987. Variations of this linear version were created for home video and other cable channels; more recently, AMC aired a slightly more violent edition in HD in 2012, and HBO offered a full-strength R-level edit for streaming in 2016. Generally all fans of Coppola's films, in direct rebuke to Crist, will always caution the first-timer to watch each GODFATHER film as its own separate film experience, but after that is done, many also enjoy the alternate miniseries option, and Paramount's multiple solicitations of such are testament to its enduring appeal.

KILL BILL has always held a special place to me in the Tarantino canon, because even though it has been described by its creator as a story that exists in a stylized "movie world" as opposed to the slightly more realish "Tarantinoverse," (to borrow from its originally intended male lead Warren Beatty, it is DICK TRACY versus BULWORTH) it's that stylization that speaks to me as a early film devotee. I can't really point to one single moment or screening from my childhood that pounded in the Golden Spike to make me a lifelong obsessive, but somewhere in 1976 the switch flipped and I started poring over Friday newspaper ads and drawing studio logos in my notebook. And as all this was developing in me...my parents had a very acrimonious divorce, an event that put a wedge between my mother and I that's never fully healed. Like, I call her every Sunday and check up on her and pray for her health, but as Nick Nolte softly growled in THE PRINCE OF TIDES, she's done a lot to piss me off, and I don't know when my parents began their war against each other - but I do know the only prisoners they took were their children. In those early months when my dad moved out of the house, and they were hashing out property divisions and visitation access, in some ways, I can understand how she would have identified with The Bride: feeling like her true love and all their friends had abandoned her and left her for dead, and her in turn making sure they would viscerally know her pain long after everyone else had ostensibly moved on. And yes, I know she loved me, in her own Conroy-esque hardness, and would have fought against anyone who tried to keep me from her. But I won't associate her with The Bride. For starters, she would not have appreciated the significance of falling asleep with SHOGUN ASSASSIN playing in the background. While she found my found my film addiction cute, she never took it seriously - she kept referring to it with the "H" word, and if you've ever heard someone use that word to describe the only thing that gives you elevation and a sense of purpose in the world, then you know why it's an epithet. More importantly, The Bride, even in her righteous fury, exercised an enormous amount of nuance in how she regarded her ostensible enemies list, and everyone else that was in the path; my mom was much more binary in her thinking. Basically, middle school was me devouring TV, teaching myself how movies work, and trying not to stir up more trouble between the folks so I could have some peace. And while I had a rollicking time watching KILL BILL as an adult, I would have downright plotzed if such a film existed in my tweens.

The rub is that if KILL BILL had existed in my tweens, I would have had no way to see it at the cinema. Definitely neither of my parents would have taken me: my mom can't even abide the word "damn" in her presence, and my father, who to his credit loved INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and ONCE UPON A TIME  IN HOLLYWOOD, wasn't a fan of "low" culture. Even with the rise of cable and videocassettes, it would have been too hard to sneak something like that past them. And I did not yet have any cool friends or relatives who could drive and were willing to take me to movies like it. So, yes, I would have to wait until some ridiculous edited version showed up on one of the Big 3 in prime time, or if I was lucky, on the local pre-Fox independent station where they often got uncut 16mm prints and sometimes ran them in the late night hours. Sure, it would have been sanitized and full of commercials and not the high-octane experience I deserved, but in light of my options then, I would have been satiated. I knew there'd be opportunity to see the "real" thing when I was older and on my own.

Thus, as an enthusiastic fan, an incurable collector of movies in multiple edits and formats, an empath to the less-digitally-advanced, and a hopeless nostalgic for the era before media overload where there was a thrill of catching movies on free analog television, with the broadcast to millions at once and the pageantry of the network intros, much like the alternate history proposed by ONCE UPON A TIME..., I have envisioned my own divergent timeline:

It's 2007. To shake up the February "Sweeps Week" programming, and in anticipation of the highly-touted GRINDHOUSE, NBC approaches Disney's now-brothersless Miramax, and expresses their interest in having the network television premiere of KILL BILL. In the retro spirit of the drive-in double feature that has yet to open in theatres, they're even going to revert to the old '70s "Big N" logo and their old "THE BIG EVENT" imprimatur to promote it. However, rather than simply air KILL BILL VOL. 1 one night and KILL BILL VOL. 2 a following night, they make the unusual proposal to present the unified story over three nights as a miniseries!  Their argument is that VOL 2 is too long to air in one night anyway, this will allow them to sell more commercial time for this unique premiere, and besides, they're not going to completely yield the schedule over because there's no way they're giving up those sweet hour-long ratings that "DEAL OR NO DEAL" and "TO CATCH A PREDATOR" have been delivering. Bucking conventional wisdom, Tarantino and Disney agree to the proposition, and thus comes...

The terrific art repurposed here is by Joshua Budich, see it in full color at his website!

In order to accommodate this three-evening structure, and agreeing in this fantasy that most but not all of the inherent carnage will be allowed to remain in the film and still be acceptable to run on the public airwaves opposite "7TH HEAVEN," "TWO AND A HALF MEN," and "DANCING WITH THE STARS," there will indeed be some radical rearrangement of the scenes. Indeed, the whole chaptering of the film will be different than any theatrical presentation.

I can already hear thousands of Hattori Hanzo swords being unsheathed at this point, ready to cut me down for speaking this kind of heretical idea in public. As your admittedly hubristic correspondent, I often anticipate, and indeed encourage you from time to time, and always in a respectful manner, to question my logic. If you're unconvinced that a particular opinion I've espoused is the wisest, tell me so, but allow me to convince you and I promise you right here and now, no subject will ever be taboo. Now, back to our program.

If you think very deeply about the emotional arc of the film, while there are five people on The Bride's kill list, there are three characters that are of the most paramount significance in her quest for bloody satisfaction. So, each evening's installment allows those three confrontations to be their respective climax. Remember the quote regarding the segmenting of THE HATEFUL EIGHT: "a slightly different format...a chapter at a [time]...look at it slightly differently...Each episode ends it an emotional place." 

This was something already understood in the theatrical releases. We see The Bride fight Vernita Green first even though she is second on the kill list. Why? Because the O-Ren fight is a larger battle in all senses, there's no way to top it, so Volume 1 has to end shortly after it's done. But it's going to be a while to get to that point, so in order for the captive cinema audience to not be left like Milhouse van Houten waiting for Itchy & Scratchy to get to the explosives factory, you get to see The Bride in action early in another nicely-staged fight, and once that's done, now you're ready to learn how she came back from a bullet in the prologue. It's like Ed Sullivan in 1964 knowing that the teens in his studio are chomping at the bit to see The Beatles, so it's better to let them go up front and then promise they'll come back later than make them wait through Topo Gigio and get restless.  A TV miniseries, conversely, can be a little more deliberate with allocating story elements. "TWIN PEAKS" opens with Laura Palmer found dead, the viewer is willing to start meeting all the suspects because they know something important's going to happen later.

So, here is how the story would play out under the auspices of the Sheinhardt Wig Company:

Night 1: ROAR

The episode opens as V1 does, with its ShawScope and Astro Dater teases, the black-and-white prologue of The Bride in her "final" moments as Bill sends her off with a gunshot, and the mournful "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" credit sequence. However, after that, the broadcast goes directly into "The Blood-Spattered Bride," which now becomes Chapter One, and everything from there unfolds as it did in the V1 theatrical edition, albeit with each subsequent chapter within ("The O-Rigin of O-Ren," "The MAN from OKINAWA," and "Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves") being bumped up a digit. The teases of V2 from the end of V1, which were not included in THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR, are retained, but Bill's cliffhanger final line is not uttered at the end of the episode, to help further the surprises to come later on.

In this incarnation, the initial two-hour installment becomes even more focused on The Bride's recovery, and her appointment with O-Ren Ishii. Even though it would ostensibly be easier to find and kill Vernita and Budd first, since they don't command a literal army like O-Ren does, The Bride has chosen this path precisely because if she can take out a now world-famous criminal warlord, it's mostly downhill from there. It'll put a little more fear into the rest of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. And most importantly, besides Bill, O-Ren is the squad member that she loved most. It is why she is given an entire chapter for her backstory - O-Ren's rise from trauma to a level of untouchability to rival Bill himself is something The Bride respects. It is also why, after having the kind of friendship where they finished each others sentences, it hurts the hardest that she willingly agreed to betray her. By decimating all of her lackeys, to the point where they must fight one to one, O-Ren will now have to respect what damage she did to her former friend. And by killing someone she still carries fondness for, The Bride will be better prepared for her confrontation with Bill.

Night 2: RAMPAGE

The episode opens with a reprise of The Bride's trunkside warning to Sofie Fatale, then after fading to black on "They'll all be as dead as O-Ren," goes straight into "2," the chapter which previously opened V1 but has now been moved here to start this evening's installment, making it Chapter Five. That is followed by the "We deserve to die" conversation between Bill and Budd, and the remainder unfolds as it did in the V2 theatrical edition, up to the finish of the "Elle and I" chapter, upon which the episode ends.

By delaying the prologue and chapter which would otherwise open the theatrical version of V2, this installment is all about delivering retribution to the remaining members of the Squad, but most importantly to Elle. If O-Ren was The Bride's best friend, Elle is her worst enemy and emotional antithesis. Besides her general misanthropy, Elle particularly fumes over the fact that she is always in the shadow of The Bride, as a fellow student of Pai Mei, as the rebound girl for Bill's affections. The only reason she even utters a single sentence of respect for The Bride, saying that she deserved better than Budd getting a lucky ambush on her, is because she knows the only witness to that statement will soon be dead. Elle knows that no matter how skilled and fearsome she is, she will always be compared to The Bride, and The Bride knows Elle's been starving for her head before she showed up at the church. Vernita and Budd certainly put up a significant challenge, but Elle as the anti-Bride is the climax to this group vendetta, and closing the night's broadcast on the finish to their feud is a clean breaking point to stop and breathe before the final showdown.

Night 3: REVENGE

The episode opens with The Bride's driver's seat address which previously opened V2, followed by the chapter "Massacre at Two Pines," and then going into the final chapter "Face to Face." Again, when watching in a theatrical setting, the Massacre is put at the front of V2 so that it is always in the back of your mind as the Vipers are dispatched and the march to meeting Bill advances, but in a TV setting, reshuffling to put the final episode entirely on the fall and finish of The Bride and Bill's relationship fulfills the same concept as the HATEFUL EIGHT Netflix edition, to look at the story slightly differently and put it in its own emotional space. And in these final two hours, concentrating all their history together and estranged, when all the secrets Bill and The Bride hid from each other come out on the table, it's a conclusion that, while perhaps forgone at the start, the TV audience would still excitedly anticipate the way they did Meggie Cleary and Father Ralph hooking up in "THE THORN BIRDS," which, oddly enough had its ABC network premiere on Tarantino's birthday, March 27, 1983.

Which is as good a time as any to break for some commercials from that broadcast date. Even fight master Pai Mei himself would agree with Sheer Elegance's proposition that nothing beats a great pair of legs.

No, if this alternate 2007 had happened, it would not be any proper way to discover KILL BILL for the first time viewer. It would have at best been an interesting experiment like THE GODFATHER SAGA or THE HATEFUL EIGHT series, or at worst a mutation excoriated by fans yet still coveted by tape traders and torrentors alongside NBC's two-night stretch re-edit of EARTHQUAKE in 1976.

But that's the thing with artists of any discipline - it's not enough to behold the perfectly assembled watch, there's always the desire to look at its parts and attempt to assemble it another way...

So happy birthday to Mr. Tarantino, one of the best watchmakers in the business.

And here's to any sheltered child today who doesn't have cool parents and/or easy access to cinemas or streaming or DVDs, that is still fending for themselves with what constitutes "free" TV: may they find something that, even in a family-friendly edit, blows their mind and spurs their own creative fancy.

Protect Me from What I Want

If you do the cursory Google searching, you will find plenty of information about Dennis Hopper's troubled and mystifying 1990 film BACKTRACK. There will be the requisite negative and baffled reviews. You'll find a thorough comparison and breakdown of differences between the initially-released 98-minute cut retitled CATCHFIRE, for which Hopper demanded an Alan Smithee credit, and the 1992 compromised-but-approved Director's Cut sanctioned by Showtime and released on VHS, including a crucial revelation of a character's heel turn that is completely missing from the shorter cut. You'll find scintillating details of the shoot, involving a writer's strike, Hopper's white-knuckle sobriety, and spur-of-the-moment attempts to include his favorite artists and actor friends. You'll even find revealing testimony from credited screenwriter Ann Louise Bardach and uncredited punch-up writer Alex Cox. In short, you can find the How, the Who, the What, the When, and the Where. What you will be likely left without is the Why? And since Hopper is gone, and co-star Jodie Foster is probably about as anxious to revisit that experience as she is to share a stage with Seth MacFarlane, that's where my speculative prose comes in.

I was keenly following the trajectory of BACKTRACK during my college years, as a fan of Hopper and of then-upstart studio Vestron Pictures, but had never gotten around to actually watching it; I didn't have Showtime when they aired the Director's Cut, and always just had something else more pressing whenever the VHS was handy. When I saw it was released on DVD in 16x9 widescreen, with Hopper's preferred title and director credit on the cover, naturally I eagerly bought it, though again, it sat on my to-watch pile for a long time. Upon finally watching it, I was increasingly taken aback by the very abrupt cutting, where many scenes seemed to be trimmed to the most necessary seconds, very reminiscent of the Fox-sanctioned Kenneth Lonergan-contested theatrical cut of MARGARET. I kept thinking, Egad, imagine how much more horribly incoherent the CATCHFIRE edit must have been. By the time my DVD player stopped at 98 minutes, despite the 102 promised on the cover, Sebastian Cabot as Mr. Pip may as well have been right at the controls of my remote saying, "Look at the cover again - whatever gave you the idea this was a Director's Cut? This is the CATCHFIRE edit!" Bloody Artisan mastered a pre-Smithee print to DVD, and Lionsgate has never done a damned thing to correct it!

Regardless of bad editing and missing storyline, I still have a decent hunch about what Hopper had in mind. As he says himself during the film, "There's something going on here that I really don't understand, but I like it."

At the time production was initiated, Hopper was enjoying a career revitalization. He had received the best notices in years for his performances in HOOSIERS and BLUE VELVET, and positive reviews for directing Sean Penn and Robert Duvall in COLORS, his first major studio picture since THE LAST MOVIE in 1971. But as writer Ann Bardach reveals in her podcast interview, he was still not quite feeling calm about it all. And with a life which up to that point had so much drama, including being pronounced clinincally dead during the making of Philippe Mora's MAD DOG MORGAN, he probably had good reason to worry about lapsing into those dark behaviors. Moreover, while COLORS was a well-liked movie (except by members of the LAPD), and Hopper brought his counterculture experience to good use in exploring gang mentalities and race relations, the film seemed to be more of a probationary test, of Hopper proving he could be a disciplined studio director, than a truly personal project. Thus, one can imagine that Hopper, having proven that he could behave and not be troublesome to Hollywood, now longed to once again indulge in less-structured creativity as he had been allowed to in the early '70's.

Thus, where producers saw a MIDNIGHT RUN-style road movie in the original screenplay by Rachel Kronstadt Mann and Stephen & Lanny Cotler, and Barach, then a crime reporter for many newspapers, saw more of a gritty Patty Hearst-style story of kidnapping and bonding, Hopper likely looked at the plot of a hitman so fascinated with his target, an avant-garde artist, that he instead chooses to abandon the hit and take her on the lam with him, as fertile ground to create an extended metaphor about being valued for one thing yet desiring to try something else. Now that he'd delivered a hit to Orion with COLORS, and Vestron had made a splash with DIRTY DANCING, he was in a good position to make the kind of artistic demands unavailable to him for a long time. And from the unconventional casting of Vincent Price as a mob boss, to unscripted cameos by Bob Dylan and Toni Basil (and, in the apocryphal 180 minute cut first submitted to Vestron, Neil Young), to prominent featuring of art by Jenny Holzer, Charles Arnoldi, and Laddie Dill, he got them fulfilled. On paper, he was making a crime thriller. But if THE LAST MOVIE was his exploration of deconstructing cinema myth on Universal's dime, BACKTRACK was his exploration of leaving safe filmmaking behind on Vestron's nickel. Even the very title BACKTRACK suggests a return to old ways, since within the film itself, while everyone is tracing the movements of major characters, nobody actually goes back to a point of origin.

Foster's character Anne (modeled somewhat on contributing artist Jenny Holzer herself) begins the movie as a successful but ambivalent creator of electric messageboard art with confrontational messages that would appear to be a passive-aggressive call for attention ("Murder is Unavoidable", "Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise"). When she witnesses a mob murder, and determines police protection to be inadequate, she flees town and changes her identity, and when she is unable to take suitable living money with her, takes on different jobs that cater to her gifts, first writing advertising copy (which is how Hopper first discovers her subterfuge), and later serving as caretaker for another's collection, before she is finally found and abducted by Hopper's hitman Milo. This trajectory suggests the plight of a headstrong actress who becomes a threat to powerful interests (mob = money men, police = studio?), and in order to survive, must slum her talents in advertising (like many an actor reduced to selling cereal bars or a poet's words co-opted for said sale), and when that's no longer viable, being entrusted with someone else's art (teaching classes, archiving, unglamorous isolating stuff) with the extra pang of living in a former movie theatre. A situation that is ripe to be taken advantage of by someone who will offer life in exchange for service.

Similarly, when the mob wants Anne neutralized, they call in Hopper's Milo, and give him whatever he wants in order to do his job - a lush accommodation with Bosch paintings, Charlie Parker albums, three computers, a budget to buy art pieces and pay parking tickets (a director, entrusted to make a "hit" movie - being given all he wants by a studio). When the crooks grow impatient, they send a young inexperienced lunk to shadow Milo to his increasing annoyance (the line producer sent by the money men to supervise the production), leading to his death (ejection from the set, wrath of the producers). During his deep research into Anne's life (what makes an actress tick?), Milo dabbles on the saxophone, only to find he cannot play well at all to his frustration. Milo is the old restless artist who has been paid well for years to do one monotonous thing and do it the same way each time, but yearns to do something new, something that matters more to him. And Anne is the muse he believes can facilitate that.

Which finally provides us with a little more rationale for what has been the constant thorn to every reviewer of the film, Anne's seemingly overnight Stockholm Switch from reluctant hostage to willing conspirator. It's a glaring plot hole in the CATCHFIRE edit, and still plays a little weird in the Director's Cut, where more footage shows that their relationship is not quite as hostile as initially presented. When viewed through the prism of the seemingly endless cycle of director/actress infatuations, it plays a little more plausible - the man who initially seems intent to break the woman's will through knowledge of all her vulnerabilities, but gradually reveals his own instead, leading to a mutual push-pull and eventual trust. I'm not justifying its presence in this script, it still just feels like wish-fulfillment on Hopper's behalf, especially as recounted by Foster, and in light of seeing him engage in similar onscreen May/December tropes with Amy Locane and Marley Shelton and Asia Argento. But remember, we're putting this movie on the couch, not on the pedestal.

Avoca, the seemingly ubiquitous corporate front of Vincent Price's criminal organization, carries a loaded meaning or two as well. Stemming from the Latin term "vocare", "to call", it can be construed in its presented form - "a voca", "a voice", how people are allowed to express themselves - or as the root of the word "avocation" - a hobby, activity, your life's calling. And in the course of the film, they want Milo to stick to his original calling, and take away Anne's voice for change. Not to mention that it's an oblivious male driver for the corporation who screws up Anne's otherwise ingenious plan to mail a package out from another city, and once again lead Milo to her.

Besides all the allusions to the filmmaking process embedded in BACKTRACK, there is a definite sense of allusion to the aforementioned THE LAST MOVIE. When Milo arrives in Taos, New Mexico to finally collect Anne, he comes across a group of Native American Pueblos in ceremony, with a large burning mascot holding people's attention. While more than one reviewer has compared this imagery to THE WICKER MAN, and I myself was reminded of the "Winter Witch" burning from Fellini's AMARCORD, it seems almost no other reviewers recognized a similar sequence from THE LAST MOVIE, when local Peruvians are cavorting with their own wooden-made cameras and other burning ephemera, as local priest Tomas Milian expresses his concerns to Hopper about the cultural confusion his film crew has brought to the region. (Unfortunately, I can't find any stills properly approximating the symmetry, so bear with me)

There's certainly other elements that lend themselves to my central idea as the story goes on, but I think I've given you enough here so that you can apply them on your own, if and when you get around to watching the film yourself. Which raises the question, should you? I would caution that only significant Hopper or Foster completists should attempt to do so, and even then, would be better served tracking down an original VHS of the Director's Cut and zooming it in to your widescreen TV, so it's asking a lot. But if you are indeed that complete and that determined, I think you'll find it, well, an intriguing objet d'art. And, if in time we do finally get a proper DVD release of THE LAST MOVIE, it would make a particularly interesting double feature with it, as you would get to witness Hopper's two most unconventional outings that had conventional origin.

My Weekend With Myra

Here I am, crashing the party otherwise known as the Camp & Cult Blogathon, presented by Stacia at She Blogged by Night. While I may often believe that those two adjectives should be relegated to the other forbidden C-words in modern conversation, I certainly do love a little celebration of the histrionic and the dementedly devotional, so there's no reason to be a sourpuss just because a few people don't understand that not every movie with overacting is automatically funny, and not every ultra-low-budget poverty production deserves to be ranked in the same company as those that earned their legions. Dare I say it, you don't have a good camp experience without a good counselor, so here I am with my whistle, though I'm more apt to blow on it to chant along with a Donna Summer song than to call stop. And in this situation, I think I have a rather amusing little story for the bonfire.

While I was never a particularly devoted reader of his books, I had a fine respect for the late Gore Vidal. I had grown up hearing him name-checked by people of many stripes whom I knew were smart, and coming across a money quote of his - "As I looked upon my life, I realized I loved nothing - not art, not sex - more than going to the movies." - I sensed that this was someone who had my number. But as an individual who also grew up being told "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him," and "If your mother says she loves you, check it out," I often found myself in disagreement with some of his pronouncements. So, with the help of some distance past his passing from the corporeal realm, I choose to commemorate his life by ruminating on my personal relationship to something he thoroughly detested: the film adaptation of his 1968 novel MYRA BRECKINRIDGE...because, to paraphrase what was once said about Led Zeppelin, I can only honor the great contrarian by destroying him.


For the uninitiated, MYRA BRECKINRIDGE was an amusing book by Gore Vidal that was turned into a harshly comic, proto-FIGHT CLUB rant on Hollywood by director Michael Sarne. The mysterious Myra (Racquel Welch), an inveterate lover of old-time movie glamour, comes to town to subvert and destroy all the trappings of new Hollywood -- overt macho, method acting, etc. She will run riot on her ersatz uncle-in-law, fallen cowboy star Buck Loner (John Huston), and seduce both man's man Rusty (Roger Herren) and his sugar-sweet girlfriend Mary Ann (Farrah Fawcett). The movie had instantly piqued my curiosity when my seventh-grade teacher, already savvy to my film obsession, lent me her copy of the Medved brothers' now-rather-harsh-and-easily-debunked book "THE FIFTY WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME," and it had a very detailed chapter about its notoriety. At the dawn of videotape rentals, I insisted my dad bring it home to watch, and it quickly became one of my favorite bizarre movies (and, if you wanna get technical, my first X-rated movie). As a child, I had embraced this as gonzo camp, under that unbearably hoary cliché of "so bad it's good" (which is so overused, it's done!), but over the years I've turned a corner (and I know I'm quite alone in this assessment) and openly declared this a misunderstood classic. Part of my reasoning came from reading the source novel it was based on a few years later as a full-fledged hormonal teenager: somehow, I just wasn't as entertained by Vidal's prose as I had been by the movie's repurposing of it. And I found the constant references to then-obscure-to-me-names like Pandro S. Berman and Francis X. Bushman to grow tedious. I could sense that this was subject matter that Vidal, through his protagonist, was not joking about, that he really was waging some sort of culture war against those damned hippie actors and their "Stanislavski" and their "naturalism" and wanted them all to get off of his Hollywood lawn. I found new cement for my reappraisal upon seeing David Fincher's groundbreaking FIGHT CLUB in 1999, because in its approach to adapting Chuck Palahniuk's best-seller, it was really following the exact same template: not only do both films satirize their target subjects, but they satirize their very own selves, reminding the audience that they are watching a movie and to not take anything seriously. Rather than treat the author's work like sacred canon, they openly challenge and exploit the flaws in the source material, an approach which a post-modern writer like Palahniuk seemed to enjoy, but which clearly rankled the comparably self-serious Vidal.

I stumbled into opportunity by meeting the movie's embattled director Michael Sarne in 2003 at my then-workplace. Sarne, whose career never truly recovered from the debacle that was MYRA, came into town from England, where he was working steadily as a character actor, to record a commentary for the then-upcoming DVD release. I gushed to Sarne like the excited movie geek I was, telling him how much I enjoyed MYRA and how underrated I thought it was. He in turn told me about his good fortune and that he was recording his commentary that Friday afternoon. He said he had never done one before, and was unsure how to go about it. I mentioned my experience with Tamara Hernandez and recording the commentary for MEN CRY BULLETS. GUESS WHO GOT TO SIT IN ON THE COMMENTARY RECORDING THAT FRIDAY AFTERNOON? (Yes, that moment still delights me that much that I needed the color emphasis on that rhetorical question.) Besides myself, Michael invited Stanley Sheff, an old friend, apprentice to Orson Welles, and director of LOBSTER MAN FROM MARS, to give him pointers as well. This setup was nice -- my first time in a soundproofed room, with timecode, synchronized recording with the master tapes -- way more pro than the D.I.Y. manner in which I had done Tamara's recording. Only Michael would be miked however -- we could prompt and comment during dead spots, but it would not be included -- the final audio is a complete stream of talk from him, though on occasion, you can tell he is answering a question one of us asked. And it was great, with good dishy details on the fighting and studio politics that went down during production. I was happy to be a part of it, however small. Afterward, the three of us went to brunch at Du-Par's, and I got to hear great tales of how long ago, when Sheff was working at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, he would raid movie lab dumpsters for stuff to run as loops behind bands and dancers, and how it became a mini-phenom there. And how he got to work under Welles on some of his later projects. I then gave Sarne a lift back to where he was staying, and he invited me in for a quick drink. We talked, I told him some of my film ideas and how at that point of my residency, despite four years and the big ups and downs I had taken, I loved this place and never regretted coming. He made me feel really significant. And he gave me an invite to watch the reediting later that week.

Oh, I should elaborate. In an extremely interesting turn of events we shall not likely see from a major studio again, 20th Century Fox not only commissioned a de riguer commentary track, but they allowed him to make minor reedits to the film. MYRA punctuates it's story points with classic film clips (a la DREAM ON if you remember that HBO series), and initially certain clips were denied him despite being in a workprint that tested well in San Francisco. Most notoriously, a MYRA character's fantasy sequence would have been followed by a clip from REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM, where Shirley Temple attempts to milk a goat and gets sprayed with the white stuff. She was not amused at the juxtaposition, and used near-Presidential influence to have it removed. While Sarne was still not allowed to use that clip, he was allowed to use a similar substitute (if one could be found), to smooth out and fix transitions between the film and the clips, and to make a key alteration to the film's ending in the manner of the DVD-only, "easter egg" B&W opening sequence on THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. So now, I had not only sat in on the recording of an aural history of one of my favorite films, I was going to watch it get reedited, an enormous privilege!

So early one afternoon, before going to work, I politely blustered my way into the telecine/color correction session for MYRA BRECKINRIDGE. When I arrived, the work was already underway, just Sarne and a computer colorist named Sheri. The primary task at hand was to sort through the miscellaneous B&W clips interspersed within the film, and provide appropriate tinting to help them match the color scenes they bisected. This was NOT "colorization," like Ted Turner was trying to foist in the '80's, but just tinting the image so that if the color scene happens in a beige, muted room, that the B&W scene doesn't jar the viewer -- instead, it would have a similar color injected, warm the image from cold grayness. Sarne had always suggested that since the story could only exist as fantasy, that the clips should suggest that Old Hollywood was present in the "New" environment as these events were happening, and making commentary upon it. Watching the process, and having seen MYRA a few times, the tints made dramatic sense, and made the snippets more organic, less distancing. Actors and photos looked to have more fleshtone, were not so harsh. And it was amazing what the computer could do. For example, for some inexplicable reason, in the original theatrical print, a clip featuring Tyrone Power as Zorro had a weird, deep red tint applied, even though the scene it was interrupting was not dominated by red. While it could not be completely eradicated, the operator was able to mute it down, take it to a more palatable tan. I am unable to make vidcaps from my DVD to show you the specifics, and this detail seemed to elude DVD reviewers who watched both versions and failed to notice these subtle changes, but you can play this Zorro excerpt in each version on your home unit and see the difference for yourself.

But then, there was the big task. As I said before, there was the matter of that payoff to the dream sequence and the Temple clip was still off limits. But Sarne had permission to replace the mundane "cannon fire" clip that had been ultimately inserted in the original version. We had discussed during a break in the previous commentary recording why that scene was so funny in it's original conception. It wasn't just the juxtaposition of a face full of milk to an physical body reaction, it was that it was Shirley Temple, America's sweetheart and paragon of purity and virtue, getting the mess. So the best way to try to get the same effect would be to find a clip of a similarly beloved movie star looked to for her "virtue". At the session, only two movies had been provided by the Fox archivists for us to search for clips -- AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, and MOVE OVER DARLING. (Interestingly, MOVE OVER DARLING had originally been intended as a Marilyn Monroe film -- the unfinished SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE -- and footage from that abandoned shoot does appear in MYRA, in a scene where Marilyn appears to meet the characters in another scene shot at the same poolside). When I arrived, they were trying some scene from AFFAIR, involving Deborah Kerr reacting with mock revulsion at Cary Grant over some affront while swimming, as the replacement clip. I could see the logic, but we all agreed quickly it wasn't doing the job. So we put MOVE OVER DARLING in the deck and fast-forwarded looking for stuff. Doris Day certainly fit the bill as the kind of "good girl" archetype that could provide our punchline, provided we find the right clip. First, there was a scene of her peeking behind bushes at a romantic encounter between James Garner and another girlfriend, and her facial expressions of shock and huff played well, as if reacting to the event it would be preceding. But we wanted to keep looking. And then, comedy gold fell into our laps. A chase scene led to Doris driving a tricked-out Chrysler Imperial convertible into a car wash. And by nervous fumbling with the auto controls, down went the windows and water began to rain into the car. Then came the soap and wax dispenser (0:46-0:49)...

 
As John Ritter said in SKIN DEEP, "THERE IS A GOD! AND HE'S A GAG WRITER!" Instantly, all three of us were nearly out of our chairs; we didn't even need to try inserting it to know we had our, sorry but I gotta say it, money shot. We did a bit of fine-tuning to figure out when to start and stop the clip (ideally, it was supposed to use the exact same number of seconds as the clip it would replace), but for all purposes, we were very happy. A test screening a week later for friends and video department brass had everyone laughing at the new edit.

However, much as with Ms. Temple Black, the former Doris Van Kappelhoff  was not amused either by this editorial choice, and would not sign off on its use. The fact that the bulk of her career consisted of many innuendo-laced comedies opposite the biggest closet case in Hollywood history would have implied to me she oughta have a more developed sense of humor about such things. In the final cut that made it to DVD, Sarne used a good-but-not-as-good Laurel & Hardy moment for his punch line. But o! what a fine moment that was. The thrill of discovery, the belly laughs, the ability to say "I was there, I saw it happen." I got a preview of what it would likely be like to edit my own movie, and find a moment on that bench that really works, that you know is solid. And though it could not survive in reality, it survives in my head, and now in this account.

So, Mr. Vidal, I hope you can respect the notion of agreeing to disagree on this movie. Not like you're in any position to castigate me now, you motherfucker...as the children say nowadays.