More Drunks in Film

More drunks!-- Well not exactly, but a wonderful bit of conjecture from the fine folks at Hell On Earth (last updated 2003-10-20 --the prominence of their t.A.T.u story gives them away). Based on especially selected screengrabs, the authors surmise that the principal cast of that grand TV remake The Avengers were royally tanked during that film's production, which, of course, would account for that epic's spectacular failure (although I would suspect the ego engorging effects of devil cocaine, just like in the '80s). See Ralph and Uma with half lidded eyes and knotted brows straight out of the Foster Brooks School of Acting, and Connery's looking rightly disheveled. From the same site, you can also find evidence of more rampant dipsomania in the Bruckheimer classic Con Air, with cool macho drunk Americans like Cusack, Rhames, Cage, and Malkovich (?), rather than the effete (Long Island Iced?) tea-sipping Britishers from The Avengers.

Drinking on the Set!

Invariably, when you read enough movie production histories (particularly the low-budget genre kind), it doesn't take long before you come across a sentence like this: "... it was an open secret that [name your favorite down on their luck actor] was drinking on the set....". The drunk actor was practically a stereotype since the days of Barrymore, and that stereotype never flourished more than in the meatgrinder world of Hollywood filmmaking. Especially in the back stages of poverty row grade-Z productions, with their skimpy budgets and truncated schedules and their harsh and unreal expectations, many actors would find solace in booze, finding in the bottle either a kind and gentle anesthetic, or a fuel for bravura. And often these actors were once major stars, commanding fortunes and enjoying the adulation of millions. When they once were scented with the sweet perfume of success, they now wallowed in the shit stink of cardboard sets, six-day shooting schedules, the sweaty indifference of journeyman technicians, and the paltriest of paychecks. Call it a weakness, if you must, but who could begrudge them a sip or two.

One of the more vivid images I remember from reading Gregory Mank's excellent history of the Universal Frankenstein series It's Alive! more than 20 years ago was the sight of Lon Chaney Jr., in full Monster makeup and costume, taking a couple of nips from a pint bottle behind the sets of The Ghost of Frankenstein. It goes without saying that this was the pinnacle of Chaney's movie career (he was now Universal's leading horror actor). It was downhill from there. One of the more infamous examples of mixing liquor and acting was Chaney's appearance in the 1950s program Tales of Tomorrow's live production of Frankenstein, where Chaney once again played the Monster. His performance was erractic, even surreal at times. He often looked plaintively straight at the camera, as if looking for direction. Some say Chaney had a bit too much to drink before the performance, and was not fully aware that this was not a dress rehearsal but a performance being broadcast live to millions. At any rate, Chaney's performance made this Tale of Tomorrow the most memorable of the series.

Some more set boozing anecdotes:

Not Elvis! Q: How was Elvis on the set?
Stella Stevens: It was fine working with Elvis. He was nice, but he also was drinking on the set. Anything that Elvis said had to go through the Colonel. He was not allowed to speak for himself. If Elvis had a drink -- and believe me, in Hawaii he loved those rum punch drinks -- it would be swept away and a bottle of Coca Cola would be set there in front of him. He was drunk when he sang "Return to Sender" and not a really professional actor. When I left it after the 6th day, I said, "I?ll just forget about it." Did you ever try to forget about an Elvis Presley film? It totally is impossible. Totally impossible. (she laughs)

Mitchum vs. Otto... Director Otto Preminger had declared there was to be no drinking on the set of River of No Return. One day he saw an actor crossing the set with a glass of vodka. He lambasted the actor who said, "I'm just taking this to Mitchum." The director paused and said, "Oh, that's different," and allowed the actor to complete his mission. Preminger had learned not to cross Mitchum in the earlier Angel Face.

In like Flynn! Australian actor Errol Flynn was frequently banned from drinking on the set. Necessity being the mother of invention, the savvy star soon developed a solution: Injecting oranges with vodka and eating them during his breaks.

The short and tragic life of Superman... While George Reeves played the heroic role of a Superman, a dark side began to emerge. In an interview with Phyllis Coates, she recalls that, "Every day at four o'clock George had open bar in his dressing room on the set. And nobody could stop him." That apparently caused some friction with production manager Barney Sarecki who deplored drinking on the set and felt that George's antics brought shooting to a halt whether they were ready to stop or not. Coates also recalled that Toni Mannix was usually with George when shooting wrapped, keeping up with Reeves, drink for drink. It was not uncommon for Reeves to host parties and card games at his home at 1579 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills which lasted late into the night. Reeves was also known to enjoy the nightlife of Los Angeles sometimes being seen with some very shady characters. In addition, Reeves continued his affair with Toni Mannix, whose husband, Eddie Mannix, was also said to have ties to the mob.

And not just in Hollywood... Writer-director Francis Veber has the highest respect for Gallic veteran Gerard Depardieu - with one qualification.
"I think he's one of the best actors in the world, especially when he doesn't drink," Veber says. "I love him and respect him, but some of my colleagues have had the bad luck of having him drunk on the set.
"I think it's very difficult to be Gerard Depardieu. He's a very big man, but at the same time he's a very fragile man.
"If he has problems at home, he can drink two bottles of wine then turn up on the set."

Spock??? Mind Meld plays like outtakes from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier's cheesy campfire bonding sequence until you realize Nimoy has started discussing being drunk on the set in 1967.

And not just in the old days... Terminator star Michael Biehn is being sued by a Russian production company, who are accusing him of being drunk on the set of a new movie. CTB Film claim Biehn - who played the man sent back through time to stop Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator character in the 1984 blockbuster - made sexual advances toward production staff while drunk on the set of Amerikanets. According to the suit, filed in Los Angeles, Biehn showed up drunk on the second day of filming in Russia and was "excessively intoxicated, his speech slurred and erratic, and he had trouble walking". He is also alleged to have carried a Pepsi Cola bottle containing vodka and made advances on female production employees - behavior which continued for several days. CTB claim scenes with Biehn shot in Russia were useless, forcing the company to suspend production. In Amerikanets, Biehn as an American stockbroker who loses millions when a Russian company he invests in declares bankruptcy, and then travels to Russia to seek justice.

Take this with a grain of salt... "It was OK when she wasn't drunk on the set. I think she's an alcoholic -- it was either that, or she was on cough syrup the whole time," Gallo allegedly said about Ricci.

The great ones can even use an actor's drunkeness as inspiration.... Fellini: It?s always satisfying when you can turn something that goes wrong into something that is even better. If I saw that an actor like Broderick Crawford was a little drunk on the set, I tried to make it part of the story.

And it's not just actors.... JM: You got to work with Stanton again on Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid [1973] for director Sam Peckinpah. In fact, you did two other movies with Peckinpah in the '70s [Convoy (1978) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)]. Tell me about working with him. The stories of his drinking on the set are legendary.
Kris Kristofferson:They're true, too. I had to take a pistol away from Sam once: He was lying sick in bed and took a shot at Harry Dean Stanton and my piano player, Donnie Fritts. I got a call about it and went over there and said, "All right, where is it?" He was heavily anesthetized with Mescal or something. Sam was a good man; he just needed turmoil around him.

And another cinema great.... Mickey Rooney recalls that Buzz [Busby Berkeley] was often drunk on the set and once almost fell from one of the girders where he had climbed to set up shots of the dancers. To avoid a serious accident, the grips put a rope around his waist, tossed it over a"strut" and held it while he crawled about from girder to girder. Then they picked out the biggest extra around to hold the rope. However, several times Buzz fell off and dangled up there while the big guy held on for dear life.

For some more drinking tales, here's a nice piece called Drunks On The Set.

Skidoo - Poster of the Week

Poster of the Week!-- Timothy Leary: "I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He was much hipper than I was." I haven't seen Otto Preminger's Skidoo, but I certainly want to. It undoubtedly belongs in that small circle of films that's more talked about than seen (movies like Salo, Singapore Sling, Myra Breckinridge, and The Cremaster Cycle). I first heard about Skidoo years and years ago in the Medved Brothers' Golden Turkey Awards (a book, I must admit, that became a core of my film education when I was a teenager because of it's concentration on little known genre films and obscurities, but which holds little value today because of its snarky condescension and middlebrow elitism, which is much more value than I hold for brother Michael's role as moral arbiter nowadays). Of course, the Medveds trashed it, but the film intrigued me then, and it intrigues me now. In case you don't know about it, Skidoo was Preminger's paean to LSD. Preminger had experimented with LSD under the supervision of Timothy Leary in the mid 1960s, and came away thinking the world of it. Now, he wanted to make a film about it. But instead of some overly serious investigation of the lysergic experience (which was the norm back then, especially in rock music), he made his acid movie a wacky comedy which featured the talents of Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Mickey Rooney, Frankie Avalon, and Groucho Marx as a mob boss named "God". It's this odd melange of old school gin-soaked Hollywood hipsterism and 1968 psychedelia that gives Skidoo it's unique place in movie history, or, at least, in the history of drug cinema. Will it ever be released on DVD? Chances are, sadly enough, not anytime soon.

Some more Skidoo stuff: The Smoking Gun has some FBI memoranda about Skidoo, mainly concerning how the FBI was portrayed in the film (not very well, apparently); Kempa has an mp3 of Harry Nilsson singing the end credits from the film; here's the cover and liner notes by Laugh-In announcer Gary Owens of the soundtrack album; also, a piece by Paul Krassner about tripping with Groucho Marx. Groucho, an intensely curious man, wanted to see what was the big deal about acid. One of his revelations that afternoon involved his role as "God" in Skidoo: "I'm really getting quite a kick out of this notion of playing God like a dirty old man in Skidoo. You wanna know why? Do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?"

"Always?"

"If they're not, then it's a misuse of your power to make people laugh"

Then, after that exchange, Krassner reports, Groucho's eyes began to tear.

As always, click on the image on the left for a larger version (550K). And if anyone knows where I can get a decent looking copy of Skidoo cheap, let me know.

Twin Psychos

Quick online viewing tip-- An effortless looking melding of the shower murder sequence from Hitchcock's and Van Sant's Psycho(s) from filmmaker Frank Hudec. It's interesting to note that most of the images in the Hitchcock version are flipped so we can see one shot as the mirror image of the other. It's also obvious how Janet Leigh is so much more expressive than Anne Heche, from the sensual abandon she exhibits in the shower leading up to her abject terror during the attack. It's a testimony to the acting chops of the late, great Ms. Leigh. Heche, on the other hand, seems to be phoning it in; or maybe it's just '90s post-ironic cool. Speaking of '90s cool, Van Sant's artsy inserts during the scene (a cow on the road, a tempetuous sky), were excised in favor of a more seamless sequence (I suspect some heavy duty and meticulous editing went into the making of this piece).

There are some other short pieces on Hudec's site worth taking a gander at, including a sort of dance remix of scenes from The Usual Suspects.

Yeah, I found this through Metafilter.

Introducing 'Tippi' Hedren

One morning in 1961, Alfred Hitchcock watched the Today Show on NBC and saw a commercial which would not only change his life, but irrevocably the life of the actress in the commercial. The actress' name was Tippi Hedren. She explains in an interview with Joe Bob Briggs:

And he saw one particular . . .
TIPPI: One of them was a Pet milk product called Sego. It was a diet drink. And it was a story line; it wasn't just holding up a product and talking about it. It was a story and apparently he saw it.
But what exactly did you do in the commercial to make such an impression?
TIPPI: Apparently, the action that attracted him was I'm walking down the street and a little boy whistles at me and I turn to react to him and smile, and that's what apparently caught his eye.
Really?
TIPPI: Yeah.
If you look at all his leading ladies, like Grace Kelly and Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint and Janet Leigh, he had a thing for blondes didn't he?
TIPPI: Oh didn't he?

Some screenshots of that very commercial can be found in this elegant French 'Tippi' Hedren site (yet another tribute site!), which also has shots from some of her screen tests (directed by Hitchcock himself), along with plenty of production stills and publicity shots from The Birds and Marnie. If you're not familiar with the strange relationship between Hitchcock and Hedren, here's a recent interview with Hedren from the Times Online (the title of which, "The birds attacked me but Hitch was scarier". should give you a clue.

Poster of the Week

Poster of the Week! The feast continues unabated. Continuing with the literary shenanigans,here's the 1966 French poster of Francois Truffaut's adaption of Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. It has a lot of faults but I love this movie. Nicholas Roeg's photography, and, above all, Herrmann's music makes it. "Thank you for giving my film a heart," Truffaut supposedly said to Herrmann. Truffaut was no slouch himself. The film's film's final sequence, with the serendipitous falling snow (it wasn't planned; it just snowed that day), the murmurs of the book people reciting their texts, and Herrmann's glorious music, is one of the most beautiful in cinema, a tribute to film and to literature.

Here's a cool looking Italian tribute to the film. Of course, click on the image on the left for a larger image. 798K.

Propagating the Meme

Propagating the meme... Is it anything like admonishing the bishop?

From a suggestion from Mr. BaliHai, he with the fantastic and bloodshot Eye of the Goof.

Okay, I'll play...

1) You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?

Because I'm a supremely lazy man, and because it's short and its simple and conversational style probably would make it an easy book to memorize, I would have to answer: Post Office by Charles Bukowski. Sure, Ham and Rye is a better book, but I really love Post Office. Such a caustic little thing. And it's extraordinarily funny, so I'll be a big hit at Book People parties and get-to-togethers. So, do I get to hang out with Julie Christie.

2) Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Julie Christie (the short haired one) from Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451.

3) What are you currently reading?

Halfway through Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. I like it, but it's slow going. It's dense as all fuck. Also: almost finished with Eduardo Galeano's Century of the Wind, a history of Latin America during the 20th Century in vignettes. Poetic and disturbing. It's the third volume of Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy.

4) The last book you bought was:

The aforementioned Quicksilver. Also, on the same trip, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light

5) The last book you read was:

The aforementioned Hitchcock biography. Big revelations: Hitch was probably impotent. Consequently, Alma had a brief affair. Also, Hitchcock wasn't a big a freak as Spoto made him out to be. Consequently, it's not as interesting as Spoto's book. More McGilligan revelations: Hitch dug the new cinema coming out of Europe in the '60s: Godard, Truffaut (of course), Fellini, and especially Antonioni. Wanted to make artier films, but Universal wouldn't let him (also combined with Hitchcock's own timidity, fear of confrontation, and, striking him for the first time in his career -probably because of the younger filmmakers coming out of Europe, his own artistic insecurity). One of his favorite movies at the end of his life was Benji (he was a great dog lover).

6) Five books you would take to a desert island:

Probably Ulysses, maybe Faulkner's Novels 1930-1935 from Library of America (cheating somewhat, I know; then, Absalom, Absalom, otherwise), a volume of the complete works of Shakespeare, an athoritative guide to survival on a deserted isle, and, for entertainment's sake, a complete guide to psychotropic plants.

7) Who are you going to pass this stick to, and why?

It seems mightily presumptuous to foist this on anyone, and I'm reluctant to do so. On the other hand, with an internationalist bent in mind, I wouldn't mind reading Carmen's, Patricio's, or Thomas' responses to these queries.

Soon, a cinematic toss from M. Valdemar...

Filmprogramme

Here's something cool -a gallery of scans of German film programs from the '30s to the '60s. Another fantastic find from the wonderful folks at RetroGrafix , where you can also find complete scans of the programs of films like Von Winde Verweht (Gone With The Wind), and An einem Tag wie jeder andere (The Desperate Hours).

Along the same vein, here are two collections of vintageautographed pictures of mainly German filmstars.

Luis Buñuel is Still a Great Director (thank god)

Finalmente, Don Luis has made the cut. Not "slicing up eyeballs", I want you to know, but Luis Buñuel finally has an entry in the Senses of Cinema's Great Directors database. If you're not familiar with Great Directors: A Critical Database, it's quite possibly the best and most thorough historical, biographical, and critical survey of movie director you're likely to find on the web. Here, you're likely to find Bob Clampett elbow to elbow with Jean Cocteau, Lucio Fulci sitting next to Sam Fuller, Keaton right beside Kiarostami, just to pick up semi-random pairings from the database's alphabetical listing (and looking over these pairings again, I find that there may be more simularities between these pairs than may have met the eye --but that's for another time). Let's here it from the Senses people themselves: "Importantly, the database does not endorse any sort of classical “Director canon”. The profiles present Directors from across the intellectual spectrum: those praised, those reproached, those not considered, those unheard of. Common to them all is a unique vision and meaningful contribution to cinema."

Also this: "...the database is concerned with bodies of work and an auterist approach to experiencing cinema: that one can seek out films according to their directorial credit and that this endeavour results in an aggrandised fascination with the films – and subsequently cinema in general – as one encounters ideas, themes, statements, faces, gestures and formal devices repeated, augmented, reversed or illuminated by those in the Director's other works. The underlying principle is that such an approach yields a kind of cinephilic “multiplier effect”. For those lucky enough to be discovering cinema, the Great Directors profiles can provide a good structuring framework with which to manoeuvre through this most labyrinthine of artforms."

Get thee there now, if you've never been.

More Buñuel soon....

Poster of the Week!

Poster of the week! Alas, a bit late on serving the feast this weekend, so a Poster of the Week would have to suffice.

Charles Chaplin called him the "funniest man in the world", and his stage name became a Spanish verb (cantinflear - an act of doubletalk; a torrent of verbiage for a prolonged amount of time that fails to make any sort of sense at all). Of course, we are referring to the great Mexican movie comedian Mario Moreno Reyes 'Cantinflas'.

U.S. film fans are probably more familiar with Cantinflas' turns in Hollywood pictures like Around the World in 80 Days and Pepe, both in which he co-starred with the biggest stars in Hollywood. Although he was quite a remarkable physical comedian, it was his verbal acuity, wordplay and twisting of logic and syntax that made him the biggest comedy star in Mexico and throughout Latin America. Translating Cantinflas' unique brand of verbal humor into American English was close to an impossible task ("like translating Groucho Marx into Chinese," someone put it), so instead the American producer-directors (Mike Todd and George Sidney, the men behind 80 days and Pepe, respectively) insisted on a broader physical sort of comedy. If it worked at all, it was because of Cantinflas' talents and comic instincts solely. Pepe is a plodding nag of a picture that was intended as a breakthrough star vehicle for Cantinflas, but was so dull and ponderous (almost 3 hours long!) that it can almost serve as a textbook example in how not to make a comic film. Some consider 80 Days to be the worst film ever to win a Best Picture Oscar. Well... maybe. At any rate, Cantinflas is the best thing in the movie, and the only reason that I find to stick with long drawn out mess whenever it shows up on TV (which used to be often, but not so much anymore, except maybe on TCM.

There's not much Cantinflas' Mexican work on DVD, although you can possibly find copies of his early films with gray market dealers (like this one from Argentina, which has some pretty cool screenshots and title cards). There's also very little about Cantinflas on the web. There's some information from Answers.com (by way of wikipedia), a page on Cantinflas cartoons that were very popular in the '60s, a NY Times article about a one man show entitled "¡Cantinflas!" (which looks very good, by the way), and a poem by Victor Hernandez Cruz.

Throwing my meager penny into the pot, I offer a Cantinflas paper doll cutout from a program for the 1944 film Gran Hotel, which I have available as both jpeg and pdf, so you can print it, cut it up, and dress Cantinflas up as a bellboy, waiter, vagabond, or debonair man about town. But wait! There's more! As a special extra bonus, I've also thrown in the original poster from Gran Hotel

The Pursuit of Inner Peace Through Movie Stars

Certainly, movie star tribute sites are a dime a dozen on the wild and wonderful worldwide web, but I love them anyway for their inspired amateurism, dedication, and plain old obsessiveness. The Meeker Museum is a tribute site of sorts, looking on the surface like a digital salute to Ralph Meeker (star of Kiss Me Deadly , my all time favorite noir, and the most singularly unique film to come out of Hollywood in the '50s). Nothing truly odd about that; it has pictures, a brief bio, a filmography, synopses of important films -- everything you would expect (including the crawling marquee text). Dig a little deeper and you will find pages devoted to stars (or demi-stars?) you've either never heard of or at least haven't thought of in years. Diane Varsi, anyone? Old Sinbad Kerwin Mathews? As Jack Stalnaker, the site's proprietor, puts it:"Some were extraordinarily gifted and some are still working, still displaying their abundant gifts for generally unappreciative audiences. However, we don't preoccupy ourselves too heavily with questionable concepts like 'talent.' Maybe some of these people just looked good in the photographs, which is all that really matters anyway."

It's old school camp, the likes we haven't seen since (maybe) the days of glam, and a sort of sensibility that had its apotheosis in the mid-60s Factory days in New York. There's a lot of cool stuff here, including a then and now pictorial between scenes of Peyton Place and modern day Camden, Maine (not much has changed). A personal aside: my great-grandfather appeared in one of the last shots of Peyton Place (he's the old guy giving the Yankee staredown to Hope Lange as she descends the courthouse steps). My dad's family was from nearby Rockland (home of the Maine Lobster Festival). My dad used to tell me, "Hope Lange swam naked in our drinking water!" A point of obvious civic pride.

Online Viewing Fun

Some online viewing fun. First up, shades of The Brain That Wouldn't Die! Junior scientist attempts conversation with the comely Eva, a Nasa funded robot meant to mimic human emotions and interactions. The verisimilitude is amazing, as well as creepy. "What does the future hold, Eva?" the interrogator asks. "I will get much smarter and interesting over time," she replies. "Of this, I am sure." If only this was true for the rest of us.

Madonna consuming raw eggs and spitting them up back in Michigan many years ago, when she was broke, brunette and beautiful. Some proto-trangressive cinema shot on 8mm? A student film by someone who just saw Un Chien Andalou at the studnt union's experimental film nite? Or a really, really lame attempt at arty porn (a la Metzger or Borowczyk)? You be the judge. See it courtesy of the fine folks at WFMU.

...but also... Pretty grand clips of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's 1960s British comedy show Not Only... But Also. If you're adventurous enough and don't mind the occasional F and C word (well, more than occasional I would venture), then listen in to some outtakes from Pete and Dud's 1970s Derek & Clive albums. Courtesy of the fine folks at The Establishment.

Here's the only film appearance of jazz era songstress Annette Hanshaw. She had an incredible voice that seemed really ahead of her time, and I am truly impressed by her. Here's a bunch of mp3s of some of her old sides (a caveat: the sound quality's not great), and you can find a lot of info on the great Miss Hanshaw here.

Weekend Poster Feast 10

Weekend Poster Feast 10. "The Hottest Exposure Since Man Created Film!" Such hyperbole was common when applied to the films of Brigitte Bardot back in the '50s as she was ascending to take her well appointed seat as the reigning international sex queen. Frankly, I haven't seen Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune (or, The Night Heaven Fell, as it was known in the US), but this French poster is a striking piece of movie advertising art. Here's an interesting comment from her co-star Stephen Boyd: "All I can say is that when I'm trying to play serious love scenes with her, she's postioning her bottom for the best-angle shots." A good BB appreciation here from Swinging Chicks. Also, a wonderfully specific gallery of Brigitte in opera gloves.

As always, click on the image on the left for a larger version. 237K.