The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death

 

From a very early age my parents instilled in me a love of movies. Some of my earliest memories are of seeing an animated Raggedy Ann and Andy movie in a darkened theater. This love of cinema also extended to my reading material. In addition to reading copious amounts of comic books and the young adult fiction of S.E. Hinton, I was given at an impressionable age a children’s novel by Daniel Pinkwater entitled, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. It not only contains several references to movies and movie stars, but also features such evocative imagery that I could so easily see it being made into a film. I always imagined it being directed by Beetlejuice (1988) era Tim Burton.

The protagonists of the novel are two boys – Winston Bongo and Walter Galt – who meet in English class at Genghis Khan High School. They become fast friends and bond over how “utterly boring, nauseating, stupid and generally crummy it is.” Winston introduces Walt to the practice of Snarking Out, which involves getting up at 1 a.m. and sneaking out of your home undetected. Oh, how awesome that sounded at my young age. The two boys meet and take a downtown bus to the Snark Theater, which has a different double bill every day (for example: Vampires in a Deserted Seaside Hotel at the End of August and Invasion of the Bageloids) and is open 24 hours – basically, my dream movie palace! Another perk of this place was that if you submitted the name of a movie they would get it and send you a letter with a free ticket when they got it. You can also submit your birthday and they will send you a free ticket for that day.

The Snarkout Boys takes me back to the heady days when going to the movies was a communal experience: “I’ve never had so much fun at the movies. As each new film started, and the audience heard the Laurel and Hardy theme song, everybody started cheering and clapping. We did, too.” Walt even champions seeing a movie in a theater as opposed to on television:

“The thing about Laurel and Hardy movies that you can’t get from the chopped-up versions on television is how beautiful they are. Things happen exactly at the moment they have to happen. They don’t happen a second too soon or too late. You can even predict what’s going to happen—and it does happen—and it surprises you anyway. It doesn’t surprise you because it happened, but because it happened so perfectly.”

On the way home, the bus breaks down so the boys continue on foot and take a detour through Blueberry Park, named after James Blueberry, the toothpick millionaire and whose will stipulated “that the city could have the park, as long as people were permitted to speak there. Anyone who wants to can make a speech there. They don’t have to have a permit or anything like that.” Winston and Walt listen to a trade unionist complaining about working conditions in beatnik-speak – pretty advanced stuff for a children’s book!

On a solo snark Walt meets a girl his age – Bentley Saunders Harrison Matthews or Rat to her friends. She’s a skinny girl with blonde-green hair and happens to be a huge fan of legendary actor James Dean. Walt finds out that she’s been snarking for years. She tells Walt and Winston about her uncle Flipping Hades Terwilliger who has been snarking every night for 15-20 years.

The thing that struck me about these characters years later was their good movie-viewing habits, going to see films like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Song of the South (1946) – I had not heard of these films when I first read this book. I also love the snapshot Pinkwater gives us of the Snark Theater’s audience:

“The Attack of the Mayan Mummy came on. Almost at once, people began fidgeting, talking and leaving. As the movie progressed, those people still in the theater were almost all engaged in conversation in normal tones of voice. People lit up cigarettes, friends called to each other … Nobody complained. It wasn’t the sort of movie you’d want to pay attention to.”

What strikes me about the book now is its unique protagonists: two overweight boys and a rat-faced girl with punk rock hair, but Pinkwater doesn’t judge them and, in fact, champions them by further populating the book with oddballs and eccentrics typified by Rat’s family. There’s Aunt Terwilliger, an avid opera fan and yet prone to making speeches about how people shouldn’t listen to them. Uncle Flipping is a mad scientist who does research and development for Bullfrog Industries – the source of the family fortune. Their Chinese butler Heinz (who prefers to be called F’ang Tao Sheh) isn’t really Chinese. Finally, Rat’s mother, Minna Terwilliger Matthews, believes that all realtors are extraterrestrials that have been systematically replaced since the 1950s.

After breakfast, Uncle Flipping mysterious disappears. Has he wondered off? Was he kidnapped? Apparently, he does this often and it is up to the rest of the family to find him. Since they are on vacation, Walt and Winston offer to help Rat find her uncle. It may have something to do with international master criminal Wallace Nussbaum, the king of crime. He was kicked out of South American army for terrifying chickens and holds the world’s boomerang record.

The journey that Walt, Winston and Rat take finds them going to Lower North Aufzoo Street or, “the city beneath the city” as it is known. It is a fascinating look at what goes on behind the scenes as Walt and Winston discover the source of truck deliveries to the business district, where the garbage gets picked up, and a network of steam pipes that heat all the big office buildings. It is these descriptive details of the fictional town of Baconburg that Pinkwater really nails and immerses the reader in this vivid world. For example, at one point our heroes go to get a hotdog and even such a seemingly mundane task such as this is brought to life via such evocative prose:

“About half a block up the street, we could see a puddle of very bright, very yellow light. As we got close, we saw that it was a hot-dog stand with a sort of glass enclosure in front of it. There was a flickering blue neon sign in the window that said ED AND FRED’S RED HOTS … All the lights in the place were these yellow fluorescent light—the kind that are supposed to keep bugs away—and there were a lot of them. This made the brightly colored hot dogs and relish look even stranger than they must have looked in broad daylight.”

According to an article in the Chicago Reader, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death was inspired by Pinkwater’s experiences growing up in 1950s Chicago with several of the fictional places standing in for actual landmarks that he frequented. For example, the Snark Theater is a reference to the now defunct Clark Theater, which would show movies 24 hours a day and feature a different double bill every day. The public debates that occur in Blueberry Park actually took place in Bughouse Square. The oddly named Lower North Aufzoo Street is a riff on the famous Lower Wacker Drive. I can only imagine what a treasure trove of nostalgia a book like this must be for readers who grew up in Chicago.

For Pinkwater, he is interested in preserving, “the dying cultural treasures of urban life… There are things I`ve seen and experienced that have been very precious and nice, and I feel almost bad that they`re gone now… And when you read about these things, you say, ‘Damn, I’d like to go there tonight!’ I enjoy keeping some of this stuff alive.”

The kinds of descriptions I mentioned earlier are ones that I can see Tim Burton bringing to life in a film. When I first read The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death I pictured the entire story in my head, imagining exactly what these characters looked like and the adventures they went on. Pinkwater wrote a sequel entitled, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, which continued the numerous film references, but wasn’t nearly as satisfying a read as Avocado of Death, but then sequels rarely are. That being said, like any good young adult novel, Pinkwater’s book appeals to both youthful readers and older ones that pick up the references to obscure foreign and B-movies. It is a worthy addition to any budding cinephile’s library.

 

SOURCES

Pinkwater, Daniel. The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books. 1982.

Sachs, Ben. “My Favorite Book About Chicago Moviegoing.” Chicago Reader. June 17, 2013.

“Twisted Reality.” Chicago Tribune. February 21, 1990.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

After the critical acclaim of Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991), filmmaker Gus Van Sant parlayed his newly-acquired clout within the film industry to realize one of his dream projects – an adaptation of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. This 1976 novel about the freewheeling adventures of Sissy Hankshaw, a young woman with enormously large thumbs that give her a preternatural ability to hitchhike through life. Robbins deftly used magic realism to tackle topics such as free love, feminism, drugs, animal rights, and religion, among others.

In 1977, Tom Robbins autographed Gus Van Sant’s copy of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and the future filmmaker vowed one day to adapt it into a film. Producer Robert Wunsch optioned the book and in April, 1977, hired screenwriter Stephen Geller to adapt it. This option expired a year later and actor Shelley Duvall bought the rights. In 1980, Warner Brothers hired her to write and star in a film version, for which she even wrote a screenplay, but nothing came of it. “One studio told me, ‘Too quirky even for us,’ and I had toned it down quite a lot!” She lost the option to Daryl Hannah. Let’s take a moment to contemplate what Duvall’s version would have been like…with her unconventional looks and style of acting, she might have been an excellent choice to play Sissy.

Jump to May 1990 and TriStar Pictures had the rights, hiring Van Sant to direct Cowgirls. Two years later, the studio put the project on hold after deciding that the material may not be accessible enough for mainstream audiences. In August of 1992, the rights moved over to Fine Line Features, who agreed to produce Van Sant’s adaptation for $9 million. Shooting began in September, in New York City.

When it was announced that Van Sant would write and direct the adaptation, it seemed like the ideal marriage between filmmaker and source material. His depictions of Bob’s (Matt Dillon) drug-induced daydreams in Drugstore Cowboy and Mike’s (River Phoenix) surreal, narcoleptic dreams in Idaho suggested that he was the perfect filmmaker to bring Cowgirls’ unique brand of hippie-tinged flights of fancy to life.

After Idaho, everyone wanted to work with Van Sant; he cashed in his cool clout to populate Cowgirls with cameos from the likes of Roseanne Arnold, Buck Henry, Carol Kane, and William S. Burroughs, while also casting prior collaborators Keanu Reeves, Grace Zabriskie, and Udo Kier. He even got k.d. lang, hot off her internationally lauded 1992 album, Ingénue, to create the soundtrack. In the central role of Sissy, he cast then-up-and-coming actor Uma Thurman, who had gotten good notices for her performances in Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Henry & June (1990) and, a year later, would strike it big in Pulp Fiction (1994).

Cowgirls screened at the 1993 Toronto International Film Festival where it was savaged by critics. This prompted Van Sant to recut the film before its release in theaters where it was subsequently mauled by critics, grossing only $1.7 million off an $8.5 million budget. Where did it all go wrong for Van Sant, who had been such a critical darling prior to Cowgirls? Had he merely misunderstood the source material? Was it simply another case of a book that could not be adapted into a film? Most importantly, is Cowgirls any good?

Right out of the gate, Van Sant introduces Sissy in two scenes featuring cameos by Buck Henry and Roseanne, which was a mistake. We are trying to get a handle on who Sissy is and where she’s coming from, only to be distracted by these instantly recognizable celebrities. These cameos take one out of the film at the crucial moment we are meant to be learning about Sissy’s origin story. She finds that her large thumbs give her the uncanny ability to hitch rides from anyone and uses this power to satisfy her wanderlust. Like Mike from Idaho, Sissy comes from a troubled past and seeks to find a new family that will love her as she is. Sissy, however, is not a tragic character like Mike, finding hope and promise in the open road, speaking passionately about it: “Moving so freely, so clearly, so delicately…I have the rhythms of the universe inside of me. I am in a state of grace.”

Among the eccentric characters she crosses paths with is The Countess (a flamboyant John Hurt), a rich, New York-based transvestite that gave her numerous modeling assignments years ago when she first left home. The film shifts gears and spins its wheels for a spell when he sets her up with Julian (Reeves), an artist with an entourage of pretentious sycophants played by none other than Sean Young, Carol Kane, Ed Begley, Jr., and the inimitable Crispin Glover. In an odd and uncomfortable scene, the latter shows up sporting a horrible combover and proceeds to compare the size and shape of Young and Thurman’s breasts. This does little, however, to distract from the unfortunate decision to cast Keanu Reeves as a Mohawk Indian, complete with dark skin.

After this mercifully brief episode, The Countess gives Sissy her first modeling assignment in years: go out west to Oregon and film a commercial for two of his feminine hygiene products, with a group of whooping cranes, while they perform their mating ritual in the background. He warns her, however, to stay away from the cowgirls that populate the nearby Rubber Rose Ranch, a health spa for wealthy women. This is easily the weakest part of the film. Hurt’s cartoonish queen, complete with exaggerated pratfall when Sissy hits him, appears to be acting in a completely different movie.

Miss Adrian (Angie Dickinson) runs the ranch and is at odds with the young cowgirls, led by the bullwhip-wielding Delores Del Ruby (Lorraine Bracco) and her young charge, Bonanza Jellybean (Rain Phoenix). The film comes to life once Bonanza and Sissy meet. The cowgirls are unhappy with their working conditions and decide to take over the ranch by force. The reasons behind the takeover are as much about protecting as are protesting, specifically the endangered whooping cranes, who, like the cowgirls, are being threatened by the ruling patriarchy (i.e. the government). The cowgirls are protective of the birds and use them to protest the rule of masculinity that has kept them subservient for many years.

When the revolt begins, Sissy flees to higher ground and meets The Chink (Noriyuki "Pat" Morita), a Japanese-American quasi-religious guru. He tells her about the simple pleasures of life. Initially, he comes across as more holy fool than holy man but there is a method to his madness.

Uma Thurman is well cast as Sissy. In addition to her ethereal beauty she is also able to convey the earnest passion of her character. Her approach to wide-eyed, irrepressible positivity – is similar to what Johnny Depp did with filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr. in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), but not as extremely stylized…and not as well-written. Thurman’s approach portrays Sissy as incredibly naïve, which would go against her years in the modeling industry and a lifetime of hitchhiking. She’s seen and experienced too much to have such a naïve world view. I think Thurman is opting to play Sissy and as an eternally earnest optimist, always believing the best in everyone she meets. 

Rain Phoenix has a natural presence in front of the camera with her big, expressive eyes. However, Van Sant saddles her with a lot of clunky, expositional dialogue that sounds like she is giving her dissertation about cowgirls for a Masters program, often delivered in stiff, wooden fashion by the inexperienced actor. Once we get past her awkwardly-written dialogue, the chemistry between her and Uma works its magic as their two characters fall in love.

Cowgirls screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 1993 to a disastrous critical reaction. Fine Line cancels the film’s November 3 release to allow Van Sant to re-edit the film. After the screening, Van Sant realized, “There wasn’t a focus on specific characters,” and had issues with “pacing and construction of the story.” It was a wakeup call for the filmmaker about its problems:

“Everyone liked the movie within our creative group, all parties were really happy with it and no one said it needed work. No red flags went up. It wasn’t until we had a chance to see it with an audience that we first heard feedback and got a different response than what we thought.”

Producer Laurie Parker said that the first cut was too episodic: “It was kind of like the greatest hits of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. You’d have to make it like Berlin Alexanderplatz to present all of Robbins’ digressions. As it was, we ended up going back to our original idea of focusing on Sissy and the cowgirls.” Author Robbins’ sticking point with the film was Sissy’s thumbs:

“I suggested that he change the size of Sissy’s thumbs from scene to scene. I used 30 or 40 metaphors to describe Sissy’s thumbs, ranging in size from a cucumber to a baseball bat, so that each reader could decide what they looked like. If there’s anything I don’t like about having the book filmed, it’s that the thumbs are pinned down to a specific size.”

Van Sant cut down the New York scenes, including Sissy’s relationship with Julian, in favor of more time spent on the Rubber Rose Ranch, with more attention paid to the relationship between Sissy and Bonanza. He also cut out an entire subplot involving the enigmatic Clock People, keepers of the keys of cosmic consciousness. Sissy getting pregnant by the Chink was also excised, only a shot near the end of the film of Sissy’s child in the womb remaining to note its occurrence.

This process was nothing new for Van Sant, who re-edited Drugstore Cowboy after the film’s distributors saw the first cut, and My Own Private Idaho, which took at least six months to edit. “This is a standard journey for me. It just took longer than usual this time,” he said. Nevertheless, the April 12, 1994 release date was moved to April 29, only to be postponed again to May 20. The official reason was that too many movies were coming out that weekend.

Roger Ebert kicked off the film's overwhelming negative reception by giving it a half of a star out of four. He wrote, "What I am sure of is that Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is one of the more empty, pointless, baffling films I can remember, and the experience of viewing it is an exercise in nothingness." In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote, "The central problem is Sissy. Uma Thurman looks the part. But she has a strained backwoods Virginia accent and is carried along by a script that tries to cram in so much of Sissy's life that she careers from one city to another without becoming more than a character sketch."

The Washington Post's Desson Howe wrote, "Bereft of atmosphere, or even coherence, the movie becomes an episodic parade of goofballs, eccentrics and lesbians whose lives and purposes are barely outlined. Sissy and company deserve better than this." In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "Though it is possible to pin various philosophical labels on Cowgirls, loaded as it is with undeveloped notions about feminism and individuality, nothing about it is really memorable except the appealing musicality of the fine k.d. lang/Ben Mink score, which deserves better." Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman wrote, "The patronizing archness of Cowgirls seems directed, finally, at the audience itself – at anyone who expects a movie to add up to something humane and involving."

The inherent problem any filmmaker faces with adapting a novel is that everyone who reads it – including them – has their own unique take on it that is different from others. When someone attempts to visualize their experience of the source material, they risk alienating others who didn’t have the same experience. Then there is a book like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues that is chock-a-block with fantastical, metaphysical and philosophical elements that are hard to translate visually.

 

SOURCES

Eller, Claudia. “Cutting Room Corral.” Los Angeles Times. October 14, 1993.

Grimes, William. “How to Fix a Film at the Very Last Minute (or Even Later).” The New York Times. May 15, 1994.

Kempley, Rita. “The Thumbprint of Gus Van Sant. Cowgirls Director Ropes a Bum Steer.” The New York Times. May 19, 1994.

Kilday, Gregg. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues: From Book to Film.” Entertainment Weekly. May 20, 1994.

Kort, Michele. “Shelley Duvall Grows Up.” Los Angeles Times. December 15, 1991.

Rochlin, Margy. “Shelley Duvall.” Los Angeles Times. March 9, 1986.

Medium Cool

In 1968, the United States was in turmoil. The country was mired in the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson announced his resignation. Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy – two beacons of hope for civil rights and an end to the war – were assassinated. Angry and frustrated, people took to the streets in protest, most significantly at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler was there filming his directorial debut, Medium Cool (1969), a prime example of cinema verité with its brilliant fusion of documentary and narrative filmmaking creating an immediacy and authenticity, with a loosely-scripted narrative set in and among the chaos of the Convention.
 
Inspired by the socio-political chaos that was going on at the time, he shot the film in Chicago, hoping that something would transpire at the Convention. Incredibly, he was filming as protests turned violent when word got out that the Democrats failed to take a stand against the war. His cast and crew mixed it up with actual protestors and police. The result mirrored what Wexler was trying to say – what is real and what isn’t – by intentionally blurring the line between fact and fiction.
 
Medium Cool opens with an example of the famous journalism creed – if it bleeds, it leads – as John (Robert Forster) and his partner Gus (Peter Bonerz) film the aftermath of a car accident, an injured person still in the car, only to dispassionately call for an ambulance after they get the footage they need. They then drive off instead of helping or staying with the victim, immediately testing our instinct to empathize with these characters. The opening credits play over a motorcyclist carrying the accident footage through the streets of Chicago at dawn coupled with Mike Bloomfield’s twangy, western score, setting the tone and establishing the city as a character unto itself.

The next scene takes place at a swanky party as a group of people – that includes John and Gus – discuss journalistic ethics. One man says:
 
“I’ve made film on all kinds of social problems and the big bombs were the ones where we went into detail and showed why something happened. Nobody wants to take the time. They’d rather see 30 seconds of somebody getting his skull cracked, turn off the T.V., and say, ‘Let me have another beer.’”
 
These words are eerily prophetic as journalistic standards have lowered significantly since then, generation after generation having been weaned on sensationalistic new footage with very little substance.

Wexler adopts the hand-held camera style of Jean-Luc Godard, accompanying a raw, improvisational approach to acting reminiscent of John Cassavetes. This creates an air of authenticity, encouraging us to wonder what is real and what is staged. It feels real and immediate – be it a violent roller derby match that John and Gus attend, or the scene where two little kids free a pigeon on a subway platform and play on the train ride home, in what feels like an unguarded moment. Other times, he keeps the camera mostly stationary with very little movement, simply observing his subjects, such as the scene where we watch the daily activities of Eileen (Verna Bloom), a mother, and her son Harold (Harold Blankenship).
 
A young Robert Forster anchors the film as an amoral journalist that doesn’t seem to care about anything but his job. He refuses to get involved with the stories he covers, a good thing, objectively speaking, until it is a matter of life or death. The actor brings a rugged charisma to the role and is quite believable as a veteran cameraman. His humanity begins to develop when he gets fired from his job and meets Harold trying to steal his hubcaps, taking him back to Eileen where he befriends the two of them. We see John and Harold bond watching a bunch of birds released into the wild, shot like something out of a Terrence Malick film with its stunning sunset. It is a rare moment where Wexler uses conventional shooting methods.
 
Wexler does a fine job portraying the different classes in Chicago, using John as a conduit to the more affluent citizens who pontificate on things about which they have little to no actual knowledge. He shows us the rough, economically-depressed neighborhood where Eileen and her son live in abject poverty. John also takes us to a black neighborhood where he follows up on a story about a man who returned $10,000 and gets into it with some of his friends and family, who question his motives as one of them says:

“When you come and say you’ve come to do something of human interest it makes a person wonder whether you’re going to do something of interest to other humans or whether you consider the person human in whom you’re interested.”
 
His friends give the two journalists a hard time because they are fed up with their perspective being marginalized on T.V. and the media in general.
 
John eventually gets a gig filming the Democratic National Convention, setting the stage for the film’s climactic scene. Eileen is there, too, looking for Harold, who has run away. What transpires is several actors mingling with a myriad of actual protestors and police officers as things turn ugly and violent for real. Even if you didn’t know that what was unfolding was real, you have to marvel at how Wexler ratchets up the tension between the cops and the protestors. You can sense that a clash between the two sides is inevitable.

Sure enough, violence erupts and we hear the iconic line, “Look out Haskell, it’s real!” juxtaposed with the delegates in the Convention Center who are completely oblivious to what is happening. Wexler cuts back to a montage of shots of protestors injured and bleeding. The cops start randomly beating people and it is absolute chaos.
 
In 1967, Haskell Wexler started writing a screenplay after reading Division Street America by Studs Terkel. He had been moved by the trials and tribulations of the denizens of the Appalachian ghetto in Chicago. In 1968, Paramount Pictures hired him to adapt the novel, The Concrete Wilderness by Jack Couffer, which focused on a young boy who loves animals. He merged ideas from both novels with what was going on politically in the United States, “because I was engaged with what was happening in the country that was not being reported in the regular media.” He was an active member in the anti-war movement and knew that the Democratic National Convention was going to have concentrated protests so he “junked most of the book’s plot and wrote a script about a cameraman and his experiences in the city that summer.” He wrote scenes of protest in his script: “For my film I had planned to hire extras and dress them up as Chicago Policemen, but in the end Mayor Richard Daley provided us with all the extras we needed.”
 
Wexler decided to shoot the film in his hometown of Chicago, making a deal with the studio that he would fund the production, but they had to buy the finished film, even though it no longer resembled its source material. During pre-production, he had oral historian Studs Terkel work as a “fixer,” introducing the filmmaker to Appalachian transplants, artists and musicians who portrayed Black militants in one scene, and actual journalists that appear at a cocktail party, arguing about the ethics of showing violence on-screen. Wexler had been away from Chicago for several years and needed someone who knew the lay of the land. The two men were friends in high school, and when they were reunited back in Chicago, spent a lot of time together with Terkel taking Wexler “on an adventure into my own city that many Chicagoans didn’t see being insulated by communities and money and suburbs.”

When it came to casting, Wexler chose Harold Blankenship as the runaway boy that Forster’s character meets – the only vestige left from the novel – and was actually a child from the hill country. His best friend in the film was played by his real-life brother, Robert. The filmmaker felt that the Appalachian residents were “somewhat of a forgotten people” and wanted them represented in his film. While shooting documentaries in the South during the civil rights movement, he had worked with them in Monteagle, Tennessee. To this end, he shot in the Appalachian ghetto of Chicago’s upper north side where mountain people from Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia had settled.
 
With the assassinations of King and Kennedy, Wexler anticipated trouble at the Democratic Convention and that drew him to the city: “I knew there would be demonstrations and that the police would suppress them, but I didn’t build the story or the script around that. It just sort of unfolded before me.” Wexler talked to Mayor Daley who approved police officers on the first day of filming but Wexler quickly realized that with them present, “nobody in the street would come out and talk to us. From then on, I said, ‘Look, I don’t want cops around when I’m shooting.” Wexler came to regret that while filming the riots in Grant Park where he and his crew were tear-gassed for their troubles. The famous line uttered during this scene, “Look out, Haskell; it’s real!” was actually added in post-production. During filming they didn’t have a sound man present and his assistant, Jonathan Haze, said something resembling those words when the Nation Guard shot tear gas at Wexler.
 
Wexler sensed that there would be trouble at the Convention, thanks to a leaflet the police had put out a month prior that had a list of new crowd-control weapons.

Paramount had no idea what to do with the finished film, sitting on it for months, telling Wexler that he’d have to get releases from all the people in the park sequences. They also objected to the casual carnage and nudity. When Medium Cool was released, the MPAA gave it an “X” rating, which Wexler felt was politically motivated: What no one had the nerve to say was that it was a political ‘X’.”
 
Medium Cool ends as it began – with a car accident, only instead of John reporting on the incident, he is the incident. A car full of people pass by and much like what he did in the opening scene, they take a picture and drive on, leaving it for someone else to do something. He is treated with the same indifference he showed to the accident victim early in the film. This rather nihilistic, downbeat ending comes as a surprise and is Wexler’s most cinematic flourish, taking the ending of Easy Rider (1969) and giving it a meta spin when the camera turns on him filming footage of the end. He faces the camera as if to say, it’s only a movie.
 
 
SOURCES
 
Cronin, Paul. “Mid-Summer Mavericks.” Sight and Sound. September, 2001.
 
“Haskell Wexler on the Criterion Collection Release of Medium Cool.” Time Out. May 22, 2013.
 
French, Piper. “High Visibility: Reexamining Medium Cool on Its 50th Anniversary.” Los Angeles Review of Books. August 23, 2019.
 
Lightman, Herb A. “The Filming of Medium Cool.” American Cinematographer. January, 1970.

Bullitt

In the late 1960s, Hollywood was undergoing a significant change. The studios had lost touch with what moviegoing audiences wanted to see. By 1969 and the release of Easy Rider and its subsequent success signaled a seismic shift in cinema, making way for a myriad of unusual films that were pushed through the system throughout the following decade. Actor Steve McQueen was at the height of his powers during the transition period with a toe in each era. He had risen to prominence during the ‘60s with such films as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963), which transformed him into a bonafide movie star but, at heart, he was a Method actor serious about his craft. He used his newfound clout within Hollywood to produce two films that catapulted him to the next level, The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt, both released in 1968.

Bullitt is a perfect example of the aforementioned transitional period that was going on in Hollywood. It is a studio movie, specifically a crime thriller that sees McQueen as a police detective, however, he cut a significant amount of his character’s dialogue to suit his particular style of acting. In addition, he had the production shoot on location in San Francisco (uncommon at the time) and adhere to strict authenticity when it came to police procedural details. One of the most important aspects of this shoot was the show-stopping car chase scene that eschewed traditional Hollywood techniques in favor of cars at actual high speeds on actual city streets. This not only added to the film’s realism - it gave the sequence a visceral thrill that hadn’t been done before.

The opening credits employ a fisheye lens, mixing black and white with color as Lalo Schifrin’s cool, jazzy score sets a stylish vibe. Initially we have no idea what is going on; the action that occurs during this sequence is without dialogue. Who is chasing whom and why? Even when dialogue is finally spoken, just before director Peter Yates’ credit, it is unclear exactly what happened.

Lt. Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is tasked by Senator Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) with protecting the star witness – Albert "Johnny Ross" Renick (Felice Orlandi) – in a big trial against the Mob, known here simply as The Organization. He has to keep him safe for 40 hours. What seems like a routine assignment turns out to be much more complicated: the witness and the police detective guarding him are critically injured by two hitmen in a situation that reeks of a set-up. Why would the witness let these two men into the apartment? Frank’s boss (Simon Oakland) tells him to investigate further and do it by the book… but, of course, a maverick cop like Frank goes his own way, authority figures be damned. As he puts it, “You work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.” It is a beautifully succinct line that sums up Frank’s ethos as a cop.
 
What is so fascinating about McQueen’s performance is his choice to emphasize facial expression and body language (or the lack thereof) over dialogue. When a fellow cop is injured in the line of duty, he says little to the man, except to ask the identity of the person who shot him. The rest of the scene shows Frank reacting to what happened, the grave concern that plays across his face. No trite words of comfort are needed – the expression on McQueen’s face says it all.
 
This technique is used again when Frank revisits the crime scene where Ross and the cop were shot. No dialogue, just him looking over the scene and thinking about what happened, trying to piece things together. Typically, a scene like that would have a voiceover or Frank would be talking to himself or someone there explaining what he’s doing. Instead, the filmmakers assume the audience is smart enough to figure it out.

This being McQueen, Frank is a hip guy. He dresses stylishly and takes his beautiful girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset) to a snazzy jazz club for lunch. Even his introduction is as low-key as the man himself: his partner (Don Gordon) wakes him up after a long night (he went to bed at 5 a.m.). Frank isn’t much for small talk and that’s all we know about him; their relationship is all business. They aren’t friends that crack jokes together or are at odds with each other like buddy cop movies of later decades. It is an underwhelming introduction that gives no indication of what kind of cop Frank is – we find out over the course of the film. This is quite unusual for a mainstream studio film at the time, which traditionally spelled everything out – this is not the case as Bullitt adopts its leading man’s less-is-more aesthetic, extending to its very economic use of dialogue. When Frank goes to dinner with a group of friends, his girl by his side, we see them all talking but don’t hear their conversation as the jazz music drowns out their voices. What they’re saying isn’t important, only that we see what Frank does in his off-hours.
 
For the most part, Jacqueline Bisset is saddled with the thankless token girlfriend role. Late in the film, however, she gets a moment to showcase her acting chops when her character confronts Frank about his job, after seeing a crime scene where a woman was brutally strangled. She tells him, “Do you let anything reach you – I mean really reach you – or are you so used to it by now that nothing really touches you?” She continues, “How can you be part of it without becoming more and more callous?” referring to the violence and ugliness of his job. He has no answer for her. She cannot reconcile the vast difference between her world and his, asking, “What will happen to us in time?” to which he replies, “Time starts now.” If up until now he’s kept her at arm’s length about the harsh realities of his job, perhaps now that she has gotten a glimpse of it, she understands why he doesn’t share the ugly details with her. Bisset does a fantastic job in this scene and one wishes she was given more to do in the film.
 
Yates shows off the hilly streets of San Francisco beautifully. You get a real sense of place and the city becomes another character unto itself. We see the neighborhood convenience store where Frank gets his groceries and the grubby, hole-in-the-wall hotel room in which the witness is hidden away. Throughout Bullitt, the director demonstrates his considerable skill at visual storytelling. A key example of this takes place at the hospital, when Frank shows up to check on the condition of the witness with Dr. Willard (Georg Stanford Brown). In the foreground of the shot Frank is eating while Willard is nearby. In the background we see and hear Chalmers tell a nurse that he wants Willard replaced as Ross’ doctor because, “He’s too young and inexperienced,” and he would prefer his own surgeon to take care of the man.

Frank and Willard exchange a look that indicates they know the real reason: he’s black. It’s not spelled out and nothing is said between the two men but they know and we know it, too. It also reveals Chalmers’ unsavory side that had not been revealed up to this point. Frank was already unsure of him because he came off as a smug prick, but this clinches it: Chalmers has his own agenda and is not to be trusted.
 
The film rights to Mute Witness by Robert Pike had sold five times with McQueen’s Solar Productions being the last buyer. Initially, he didn’t want to play a cop as he felt it would hurt his counterculture/rebel reputation. Over time, he changed his mind, reasoning that an authentic performance might change people’s opinions of the police. He enlisted Alan Trustman, who wrote the screenplay for The Thomas Crown Affair, to write a treatment for Bullitt. McQueen wasn’t crazy about the complicated plot that the writer created.
 
While that was being worked on, he and producer Robert Relyea saw Robbery (1967), a heist film directed by Peter Yates, which contained a car chase sequence that impressed both men. Relyea said, “Yates had a car chase in that movie that involved cars moving along very fast, then cutting to these children at a crosswalk. It made you so nervous you couldn’t see straight.” The director was sent the script for Bullitt and thought it was “awful.” He was asked to re-read it and replied, “I’m not coming to America to make that kind of film!” He was eventually coaxed to fly to Los Angeles to tell McQueen and Relyea what he thought of the script and within hours signed on to direct the film.

While the script was being rewritten, McQueen was hands on with the casting, handpicking Robert Vaughn, Simon Oakland and others. Vaughn actually turned down the project three times and agreed to do it only after talking to McQueen, his agent and then Yates. For his partner in the film, McQueen cast long-time friend Don Gordon, whom he had known since the late 1950s when they were working in television. It was his first film role and gave his career a boost.
 
For the role of Frank’s girlfriend, McQueen cast Jacqueline Bisset because he was attracted to her, claiming that she was the most beautiful co-star he worked with up to that point in his career. He made excuses to his wife to keep her away from the shoot while he conducted an affair with Bisset during filming. He also thought she was an excellent co-star: “She catches good. She can throw it back to you with a great depth for a girl of that age.”
 
Yates thought it would be good for McQueen and Gordon if they researched their roles. They went on ride-alongs with San Francisco police officers. Yates said, “Steve and Don Gordon really had down their procedures. I thought it would be more exciting, and it was.” The two cops assigned to McQueen hazed him a bit to see if he was just another poseur actor and took him to a morgue. He was up to the challenge, showing up with an apple, eating it while being shown cadavers. Gordon, meanwhile, was taken out on a real drug bust and given a police I.D. card and carried a badge and a prop gun. He was even recognized by a suspect on a bust.

Up to this point, McQueen had a good relationship with the studio and its head, Jack Warner, who quickly agreed to make Bullitt and was hands off, trusting the actor. As production ramped up, Warner sold his stock and retired. Kenneth Hyman and Seven Arts took over and told McQueen that they wanted to be more hands-on. Relyea said, “We came in with one understanding and then found ourselves in another, it led to misunderstandings on both sides.” The studio told McQueen that his six-picture deal was now going to be a one and done deal.
 
Filming began in February 1968 and finished in May of the same year. The pressure of the new studio regime and his reduced deal weighed heavily on McQueen. He didn’t display the good humor he had on other sets as the pressure of carrying the film affected his day-to-day mood – but it did not deter him from fighting for what he wanted. The studio wanted Bullitt shot on the lot but McQueen pushed to have it shot entirely on location. Yates said, “My biggest concern was that if we were to make a picture totally on the lot, that it would look like a television series.” San Francisco’s mayor Joseph L. Alioto was very accommodating and the studio backed down. As a result, Bullitt was the first film to be shot on location with an all-Hollywood crew, a major feat unto itself.
 
Yates encouraged the actors to ad-lib and was not afraid to change a scene if it wasn’t working. For example, in the scene where Frank meets his girlfriend for dinner, McQueen didn’t feel comfortable with the dialogue as written. Yates told him and Bisset to act as if they were having a real dinner and filmed them from the outside.

During filming, the studio rode McQueen hard about the budget. Whenever a studio executive would show up on location, the actor would kick them off. The studio claimed that the production was going over budget while in actuality there was no real projected budget! In the end, the studio claimed that the budget went from four million dollars to six million when it actually only cost five million.
 
Some of the stunts that were performed during the production were quite dangerous and they didn’t always involve cars. In the scene where Frank pursues Johnny Ross on the airport runway and goes under a Boeing 707 passenger jet, the stunt involved 240-degree heat blasts from the engine with unpredictable cross winds. Stuntman Loren James talked to the FAA and pilots and was told that it couldn’t be done. Eventually, he found a pilot that was willing to do it and the stunt was done in one take. James was paid $5000 for the death-defying stunt.
 
The film’s famous car chase sequence was saved for the last two weeks of filming with the studio threatening to deny it if the production went over budget. Screenwriter Alan Trustman claims that the car chase was in the script but Yates has said that it was producer Phil D’Antoni that pushed for it. Yates had just done one in a previous film and didn’t want to do it. McQueen was prepping for the car racing drama Le Mans (1971) and didn’t want to do it either. Stunt driver Carey Lofton was brought in to coordinate the chase. He had known McQueen since the late ‘50s and they had a good relationship. The actor wanted to make the best car chase depicted on film and Lofton told him, “I knew a lot about camera angles and speeds to make it look fast. You can underground the camera so you can control everything in the scene.” Lofton told McQueen it would be expensive to do. The actor replied, “Money is no object here.”

McQueen wanted to do his own driving and Lofton spent four days trying to convince him otherwise. It wasn’t until he crashed into another car three times that Lofton asked McQueen’s friend Bud Elkins to double for him. Elkins said of his friend, “He took the corners too fast and he overshot them and crashed into cars.” The climactic explosion at a gas station was, not surprisingly, the most expensive aspect of filming and could be done only once. It was shot on the last day of filming. Even though the car overshot the gas pumps, clever editing covered this mistake.
 
The final showdown where Frank chases his suspect on a busy airport runway and beyond is more than a little reminiscent of the climactic showdown between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995). This, coupled with the all-business Bullitt and the attention to procedural details, influenced filmmakers such as Walter Hill and the aforementioned Mann; both are fascinated by the machinations between cops and crooks.
 
Bullitt had its premiere on October 17, 1968 at Radio City Music Hall. Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars and wrote, “The beautiful thing is that Yates and his writers keen everything straight. There's nothing worse than a complicated plot that loses track of itself.” In her review for The New York Times, Renata Adler wrote that it was a “terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen: Fast, well acted, written the way people talk.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Apart from specific business assigned, McQueen is able to convey the same depths of complexity in close-up reactions throughout the film’s action, which stresses brutal action no less efficiently than the political intimidation, and opportunistic legal maneuvers which are the cool menace of Vaughn’s tactics.” In his review for Artforum, Manny Farber wrote, “in a long, near-silent and very good stretch in U.C. Hospital, which is almost excessive in the way it sticks like plaster to the mundaneness of the place, the movie hits into about seventeen verities: faces looking out as though across the great divide of 20th-century lousiness.”

 
After watching this film, audiences questioned: what was the point? Was Chalmers in league with The Organization or merely an arrogant and inept politician? Robert Vaughn keeps his cards close to his vest, never giving us a clear indication of his character’s true motivations. He maintains a slick, impenetrable façade that the actor does a great job of maintaining throughout the film. Bullitt simply ends with Frank returning home, his girlfriend asleep in his bed. He washes his face and looks in the mirror, a grim expression looking back. One wonders if this befuddled audiences at the time. It certainly isn’t the happy ending most expected with this kind of a film and again, it is further proof of the winds of change going on in Hollywood where McQueen could push a film like this through the system. It isn’t as radical as something like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), but it is groping towards that kind of reinvention.
 
 
SOURCES
 
Terrill, Marshall. Steve McQueen: Portrait of An American Rebel. Plexus. 1993.

The Lords of Salem

With the exception of Eli Roth, no other filmmaker in the 2000s has divided horror movie fans more than hard rocker turned director Rob Zombie. People either love or hate his brand of grungy, white trash nihilistic cinema where he identifies with the antagonists rather than the protagonists, be it the Firefly clan in House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), and 3 From Hell (2019), or Michael Myers in Halloween (2007) and its sequel (2009). With The Lords of Salem (2012), he created his first traditional protagonist only to place her in an unconventional film. Enjoying the most creative freedom he had since Rejects, he eschewed the gore and extreme violence of his previous films in favor of a heavy atmosphere of dread. Freedom from the constraints of a studio franchise (Halloween) emboldened Zombie to push himself as a filmmaker, creating a fascinating phantasmagorical experience.
 
Heidi LaRoc (Sheri Moon Zombie) is a disc jockey at a local, popular Salem hard rock radio station where she co-hosts a show along with two others – Herman “Whitey” Salvador (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Herman “Munster” Jackson (Ken Foree). She lives with her dog in an old apartment building and one day spots a new tenant in the apartment down the hall. When she asks her landlady (Judy Geeson) the identity of the new inhabitant, she is told that no one lives there.
 
One day at work, a mysterious record shows up in an old wooden box, addressed to Heidi, by a band called The Lords. She listens to it with Whitey and the music causes her to have a vision of a 17th century-era coven of Satan-worshipping witches. She finds herself inexplicably drawn to the apartment down the hall and once there, finds herself confronted by disturbing visions, including a nightmarish beast in an otherworldly landscape. Heidi’s mind unravels over the course of the film as The Lords record really puts the zap on her, blurring the lines between reality and nightmare.

Right from the get-go, Zombie does a wonderful job capturing the cool, crisp autumn days in the Northeast via the cinematography, drawing us into this world. He utilizes a warm, amber filter for night scenes and muted colors, creating a grey, cold look for day scenes. For the first third, he adopts a slow burn approach, not revealing too much, gradually building the dread, letting us get to know Heidi so that we care about happens to her in the latter two acts of the film. He populates the film with Kubrickian low-angle shots of hallways and breaks up the story into days of the week, a la The Shining (1980). He also shows a knack for striking visuals as evident in the fiery, apocalyptic inferno that is the 17th century witch trials, illustrating the Puritans meting out their religious brand of ‘justice.’
 
Sheri Moon Zombie has gotten a lot of flak for her acting prowess and the fact that she almost exclusively appears in her husband’s films, usually in a supporting role, whether it be significant (Rejects) or smaller (Halloween). In The Lords of Salem she is cast in the lead role, the responsibility of carrying the film placed squarely upon her shoulders. Because Moon’s acting ability is inherently tied to her expressive looks and may not have the broadest range, she benefits from Zombie’s ‘less is more’ approach. Heidi doesn’t have a lot of dialogue and, once the effects of The Lords record take hold on her character. She spends most of her time reacting to the strange things going on around her. Sheri does a commendable job of showing a woman plagued by horrible visions of faceless surgeons pulling her intestines out, struggling to make sense of what is happening, and displaying increasingly erratic behavior.
 
Veteran actor Bruce Davidson is excellent as a Salem witch scholar that figures out the connection between The Lords record and the Salem witches. Zombie regular Jeff Daniel Phillips is also memorable as a disc jockey that works and is close friends with Heidi. There is a nicely understated romantic tension between the two characters, suggesting a longstanding friendship, evidenced by the familiar shorthand between them.

As with his other films, Zombie acknowledges horror films from the past by casting its royalty with the likes of Dee Wallace, Judy Geeson, and Ken Foree in crucial roles, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos by Barbara Crampton, Michael Berryman, and Sig Haig. This isn’t simple stunt casting or a knowing wink to fellow horror genre fans, rather actors playing bonafide, lived-in characters.

The Lords of Salem is a captivating film with Brandon Trost’s atmospheric cinematography giving it a much richer look than its meager $1.5 million budget would suggest. Zombie gets the most out of his locations, choosing those that give a real sense of place including, most crucially, the apartment building that Heidi inhabits. Everything has a lived-in look, from the clutter in the D.J. booth where Heidi does her show to Davidson’s bookcase-dominated home.
 
If there is one erroneous aspect of this film, it’s the reliance on the tired cliché of Satan-worshipping witches. Witchcraft is pagan in nature. While a large number of witches don’t worship any god or goddess, there are those that do…but not Satan. It could be that he is used in film because it is an easily identifiable embodiment of evil, even outside of the Christian faith. Zombie did such a great job in all other areas and seemed to be interested in bucking tradition, then fell back on a stereotypical portrayal that is disappointing, but hardly surprising as this has been done in countless horror films.
 
Zombie tones down the gore in favor of disturbing imagery reminiscent of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), creating an overwhelming feeling of dread and unease. In that sense, The Lords of Salem is a refreshing outlier in Zombie’s filmography as it dials back the aggressive, extreme horror films of such films as 31 (2016) by shifting gears to more supernatural-based horror, as demonstrated in the showstopping finale. Zombie pulls out the strangest imagery that he’s ever produced and marries it with his trademark downbeat ending, scored to chilling effect with “All Tomorrow’s Parties” by The Velvet Underground and Nico. The Lords of Salem is not a scary movie per se… instead Zombie creates a more chilling, unsettling experience. It appeared that he was maturing and evolving as a filmmaker but when it barely made back its budget, he went back to what he knew best – extreme horror with hillbillies and white trash with 31. That being said, he is still capable of throwing audiences the occasional curve ball as he did in 2002 with the odd career move of making a studio-backed film adaptation of the much-beloved 1960s family sitcom, The Munsters. True to form, by design or not, Zombie’s work continues to fascinate fans and detractors alike.