Unloosen

"Things change, people change, hairstyles change... Interest rates fluctuate." - HILARY FLAMMOND

Sometimes it feels like I grew up during the golden age of the genre parody, and that age -- now sadly passed -- will never return. The year after I was born, Mel Brooks released not one but two classic spoofs, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, and while he didn't invent the form he certainly was its standard-bearer for many years. In addition, my comedy intake also included healthy doses of Woody Allen, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker and Monty Python, and they were no slouches in the parody department, either. The problem is they were a little too good at it because most everything that has come down that road over the past two decades can't help but seem anemic and undercooked in comparison. And just so we're clear, I'm not just talking about the oeuvre of odious crap merchants like Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer here (although they have led the charge in recent years). Even before they came along there was half-baked dreck like Repossessed, National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1, Fatal Instinct, The Silence of the Hams, Wrongfully Accused and 2001: A Space Travesty, none of which did a whole lot to advance the art of the parody film. Even Brooks himself stumbled with his last two directorial efforts, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which were made to parody one specific film almost exclusively. That sort of thing is very rarely a recipe for success.

Of course, this isn't to say the single-film parody can't work. When the Kentucky Fried Theater (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker) made the transition from stage to screen with The Kentucky Fried Movie in 1977, the centerpiece of the film was A Fistful of Yen, a dead-on parody of Enter the Dragon that takes up about a third of its running time. And that trend continued when the trio stepped into the director's chair with Airplane! three years later. While it may seem like just a take-off of the Airport series of the '70s (which had already descended into self-parody by the time The Concorde ... Airport '79 limped into theaters), Airplane! is actually a shockingly faithful remake of a thriller from 1957 called Zero Hour! that stars Dana Andrews as a war veteran who has to be coaxed into landing a commercial airliner when the crew takes sick and he's only passenger on board with any flying experience. The ZAZ team not only borrowed the basic plot, they even incorporated whole scenes from the original film into their script without having to change so much as a single line. That's how deliriously over-the-top and melodramatic Zero Hour! is. (The casting is also key, with Robert Stack's part being played by Sterling Hayden. And the stunt casting of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as co-pilot Roger Murdoch is prefigured by the pilot in Zero Hour! being played by football hero Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch.) The genius of the ZAZ approach was to take the conventions of whatever situation they started with and tweak them ever so slightly, upping the ante with each iteration until it reaches the point of total absurdity. It would have been good for a shock if Steve McCroskey had declared right off the bat that he had picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue, but it's a lot funnier after we've seen him progress through smoking, drinking and taking amphetamines first.

"You're dead for a real long time. You just can't prevent it. So if money can't buy happiness, I guess I'll have to rent it." -- "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC

To paraphrase one Tom Servo, some films simply defy the laws of sequential occurrence in space and time. Such a film is Amy Heckerling's 1984 sophomore effort, Johnny Dangerously. Why did 20th Century Fox feel that America needed or wanted an Airplane!-type spoof of melodramatic 1930s gangster pictures, specifically those of James Cagney? As it turned out, the film died a quick and ignoble death, shunned by critics and audiences alike one grim September before finding a marginal place in the pop culture landscape as a perennial time-slot filler on local TV stations and a semi-cult favorite on home video. When viewed objectively in 2010, Johnny Dangerously seems like a well-intentioned near-miss, chockablock with spirited comic performances, endearingly baroque touches, and memorable running gags, yet somehow missing that indefinable spark of creative genius that elevates a film to the level of a classic. And yet, for some nebulous reason, the film holds a mysterious, hard-to-explain charm. I myself have fallen under the film's sway to some degree and have watched it several times in preparation of this very article. Why? What is the secret of Johnny Dangerously?

To answer that question, I have made rather a study of this curious film -- unscientific, yes, but earnest in its diligence nevertheless. Herewith, I present (with very minimal attempt at organization) my observations on Johnny Dangerously. I hope you will find them edifying.

"Do you think God knew what He was doing when He created woman?" - DARYL VAN HORNE (not pictured)

When one thinks of '80s movies, one name that comes to mind almost immediately is John Hughes. A former writer for National Lampoon who parlayed his work on the humor magazine into film gigs like 1982's National Lampoon's Class Reunion (his screenwriting debut and an unmitigated disaster), Mr. Mom and the first of the long-running Vacation series, Hughes moved into the director's chair with 1984's Sixteen Candles, a seminal teen comedy and cultural touchstone for just about anybody who came of age in the '80s. Its success led to a string of films set in and around the fictional Chicago suburb of Shermer, Illinois, some of which (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) Hughes directed and others (Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful) for which he merely wrote the screenplay. And smack dab in the middle of them all was the totally bonkers Weird Science, which is far from Hughes's best work as a writer or a director, but it stretched him in ways that his more ordinary fare did not.

Briefly, the story revolves around a pair of scrawny outcasts (Hughes regular Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith) who use a computer to create supermodel Kelly LeBrock out of thin air and proceed to have a wild, wild weekend with her. As we noted in our Superman III article, most people who lived in the '80s didn't know what computers were actually capable of, so a film like Weird Science could posit a scenario where a couple of geeks -- inspired by a late-night viewing of the Universal classic Frankenstein (which, incidentally, has suffered the indignity of being colorized) -- could make a working computer simulation of a woman on a 5" floppy disk by scanning a bunch of photographs into a device that looks suspiciously like a printer. Furthermore, when Hall decides they need more power, all they have to do is tap into a local military installation's network (using a primitive phone receiver modem) and it's there at their fingertips. (The sequence where Smith uses his hacking skills to get past the mainframe's security system features some Tron-like CGI and even a Twilight Zone reference.) Of course, simply scanning in a photo of Albert Einstein shouldn't be able to give their simulation Einstein's IQ, nor should hooking up a Barbie doll allow them to transfer it into the body of a real live woman, but there are certain allowances that one simply has to make with a fantasy film, otherwise you might as well just stay home.

As I was driving to work this morning, I found myself behind a pair of identical yellow trucks. They looked like moving trucks, but with an opening in the back and a tailgate like on a pickup. I couldn't see inside, so I had no idea what they were transporting, but the sign on the tailgate of the one directly in front of me caught my eye, which was unusual because I normally don't concern myself with messages slapped on the backs of trucks. For the most part, trucks either want you to tell them how they're being driven or they want you to become a truck driver yourself. Occasionally you'll find one that wants to be washed. This one was different, though. It had a sign that simply read, "FREE WOOD CHIPS."

I drove behind the truck for a couple of miles, which gave me plenty of time to contemplate what that might mean. By the time it turned off the road (along with its twin, which I noticed didn't have a "FREE WOOD CHIPS" sign on it), I had come to the only conclusion possible: Wood Chips was either the name of a political prisoner like Mumia or a righteous cause like Tibet. The first thing I did when I arrived at work was to flip a coin to determine which one it was. The quarter came up heads, so that meant Wood Chips was a political prisoner. I decided to find out everything I could about him and do whatever I could to help free him.

Shockingly, there was precious little information about Mr. Chips to be found on the Internet. I figured if he was important enough to have a professional-looking sign made up about him, then there would be at least one web site devoted to his cause. After several hours of searching, though, I couldn't even find out where he was incarcerated or on what trumped-up charges he was being held. Was he an accused cop-killer? Was he some sort of radical left over from the Sixties? I had no way of knowing. I did, however, learn more about mulching than I previously imagined -- not that I ever spent much time thinking about mulching before today.

Eventually I had to give up on my impromptu research project -- my work was piling up and my supervisor was none too pleased to find me poring over websites dedicated to tree mulchers -- but I vowed that one day I would uncover the identity of the mysterious Wood Chips and very soon thereafter he would be free. Yes, indeed, he would be free.

"And you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestows it." -- THOMAS GUTHRIE (1865)

Disney's making dirty movies!

Well, no. Not really. But that was the consensus among prudes, alarmists, and moral watchdogs alike in the mid-1980s when the Walt Disney Company began financing a series of R-rated movies through a then-fairly-new subsidiary of theirs called Touchstone Pictures. Never mind that the hallowed "D" word never appeared anywhere in these films' credits or advertising. The evidence was clear: a bastion of good, clean, wholesome family entertainment was now up to its mouse ears in the smut racket. Won't someone please think of the children?

I can still remember then-also-newish Disney CEO Michael Eisner appearing on ABC's 20/20 and squirming genially as a reporter showed him a particularly risque clip from of one of Touchstone's latest offerings, Down and Out in Beverly Hills and asked him if this sort of thing was appropriate for Disney to be releasing. The clip involved Richard Dreyfuss as a wealthy married man having adulterous sex with his maid while the family dog watches through a window. To make matters worse, the maid was actually on top during said fornication, a clear breach of missionary-position-only sexual protocol. (NOTE: This was long before Disney actually owned ABC. Wonder if the same kind of story would air on 20/20 today?) Eisner's answer, as you might guess, was political. Down and Out, he faux-cheerfully explained, was not really a Disney movie per se, at least not in the Bambi/Snow White sense. It was just an adult-oriented comedy which happened to be financed by the Walt Disney Company. That's all.

Disney, you must remember, had spent much of the 1960s and all of the 1970s flooding the film market with gimmick-laden, low-ambition "family comedies" aimed at the notoriously undiscriminating kiddie audience. Think: lots and lots of Herbie sequels and cute-animal flicks. As a result, the term "live-action Disney movie" was not exactly synonymous with "quality," and even that particular teat had run dry by the end of the Carter years. Disney continued to make live-action films in the 1980s, but these tended to be adventure and fantasy stories, like Tron and The Journey of Natty Gann. The only way for Disney to make live-action comedies and dramas that adults might actually pay money to see was to do so under another name. Ergo, Touchstone. And the gambit paid off beautifully with a string of well-received, financially-successful pictures. Today, the familiar circle-and-lightning-bolt insignia of Touchstone is just another meaningless corporate logo, imparting nothing of significance to the average moviegoer. But for a few years there in the mid-to-late 1980s, Touchstone Pictures was something of a brand name to critics and knowledgeable audiences alike, much as, say, Judd Apatow's name is today. A Touchstone comedy was generally expected to be a little sharper, a little fresher, a little funnier than the average multiplex offering. The company even had its own stable of stars, veteran film and TV performers who appealed more to parents than to kids: Richard Dreyfuss, Danny DeVito, and of course the Queen of Touchstone herself, Miss Bette Midler, who vaulted back into stardom with her appearances in Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Ruthless People, both released in 1986.

Quick news/good news:

German magazine Spoonfork has kindly featured my art in their latest issue's special guest section. Here it is!

In other news, the T-shirt that is the product of my Artsprojekt Labz T-shirt contest victory has been produced and is ready to buy, if you're interested. Click here for more info.

"Cult films don't make money." - BILL LANGE, producer of Massacre at Central High

"Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy." - DR. EMILIO LIZARDO, eccentric Italian physicist possessed by Lord John Whorphin, an evil Red Lectroid from Planet 10

When I suggested "Cult on Arrival" month I had but one film in mind and that was 1984's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, a fast-paced, effects-laden science fiction extravaganza that had the potential to kick off a franchise but fizzled at the box office. Made by a first-time producer-director (W.D. Richter, who cut his teeth as a screenwriter on films like Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon, which he co-wrote with the director, and the late-'70s adaptations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dracula) and a relatively unknown screenwriter (Earl Mac Rauch, whose only prior credits were the little-loved urban thriller A Stranger is Watching and Martin Scorsese's sprawling musical New York, New York), Buckaroo Banzai was always going to be a hard sell, but you can tell that they made the film for the love of it, not because they thought they were going to get rich off it. (Of course, if it had been a runaway success, I don't believe they would have turned those riches down.)

The other group of people that Richter and Rauch arguably made the film for were the sci-fi, fantasy and comic book geeks who were in the habit of anointing whatever blockbusters Hollywood threw their way and could presumably be counted to spread the word about their film's idiosyncratic hero, a world-renowned neurosurgeon, rocket scientist and rock star who just so happened to also have his own comic book (at least in the world of the film). And so the studio went directly to the fans, showed them the trailer, handed out Buckaroo Banzai headbands (one of which I was given by a college friend) and did whatever they could to try to drum up interest in the film. These tactics drew the ire of notable crank Harlan Ellison, who used his January 1985 column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to decry the "billion dollars' worth of promotional hype such as Big Brother-style rallies at sf conventions" being used to sell what he called "this village idiot of a movie." Needless to say, he was not impressed with it.

Luckily, I was already an avowed fan of Buckaroo Banzai, having seen it many times on cable, by the time I read Ellison's withering four-paragraph dismissal of it in his 1989 collection Harlan Ellison's Watching, so I've never let it influence my opinion of the film. Then again, within its pages Ellison also derides Star Wars, John Carpenter's The Thing, Gremlins ("it is a corrupt thing, vicious at its core"), The Last Starfighter, Back to the Future, Robocop ("a film that struck me as being made by, and for, savages and ghouls") and Spaceballs -- all of which I have varying degrees of affection for -- so I know to take his criticisms with the proper amount of seasoning. Then again, he also has high praise for an obscure 1973 film called Slither, which just so happened to be Richter's screenwriting debut, calling it "the world's longest, funniest Polack joke." And he champions Big Trouble in Little China, which Richter also had a hand in, so it's clear he doesn't prejudge a film one way or the other based on who made it (although he never does seem to have a kind word for Brian De Palma).

Dutifully irrigating the desert landscape.

(Inspired by a recent backpacking trip to the lands of the Havasupai people).

Vector art (Adobe Illustrator CS5), 2010.
Prints available!

(Detail images after the jump)

"It was hoped that Shock Treatment would repeat the success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And I think in hindsight that what you realize is that you can't create a cult. Cults happen organically. An audience finds a movie, embraces it, and makes it into a cult." - JOHN GOLDSTONE, producer

When a Hollywood movie is released to popular acclaim and financial success, the next step is clear: give the audience more of the same, only with the volume turned up, as soon as possible. It helps, of course, if the first movie belongs to an easily-identifiable category (comedy, action, horror) and leaves its most popular characters alive and ready for further adventures at the end. But how do you follow up an unexpected, late-blooming hit like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a bizarre, cross-genre mishmash which ends with the death of its central and most popular character, the transvestite alien mad scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter (played by Tim Curry)? Such was the question plaguing the executives at 20th Century Fox back in 1979 in the wake of Rocky Horror's highly unlikely reversal of fortune. British writer/actor Richard O'Brien's oddball 1972 stage musical The Rocky Horror Show had been a hit in London and Los Angeles, but an attempt to bring the show to Broadway had flopped by the time Fox's film adaptation limped into theaters in the fall of 1975. It looked like another pop culture fad had come and gone, but amazingly the movie -- about a square American couple, Brad and Janet, who undergo a night of debauchery in the Gothic castle of Dr. Frank-N-Furter -- somehow became the object of intense adulation among its hardcore fans, who used the film as the center of a truly unique multimedia phenomenon. Weekly showings of RHPS incorporated live performance, audience participation, and the filmed image. Complicating matters further, as far as a sequel was concerned, the film's following was at least partially ironic: the tradition of yelling "callbacks" at the screen started as a form of heckling during the many awkward pauses in the dialogue. But, still, the demand for more Rocky was definitely there, and so O'Brien got to work on a sequel to his famous/infamous creation.

The initial result of O'Brien's labors was a screenplay called Rocky Horror Shows His Heels, conceived as a direct sequel to the first film in which Dr. Frank-N-Furter rises from the grave, Janet gives birth to his half-alien baby, and Brad reveals himself to be homosexual. This script, accompanied by a demo tape of new songs, apparently did not instill much confidence in the Fox brass, so O'Brien set about reworking the project with Jim Sharman, the director and co-writer of the original Rocky Horror film. Eventually, through a series of rewrites, Heels mutated into something called The Brad & Janet Show, which in turn became what we now know as Shock Treatment. Along the way, all three principals from the first film -- Tim Curry, Barry Bostwick, and Susan Sarandon -- either became unavailable or backed out, and the entire project had to be reconceived on a much-smaller budget following an actor's guild strike. What had been planned as a location shoot in Dallas, Texas would now be filmed entirely within a British soundstage. The resulting film came out in 1981, six long years after the first, and was quickly rejected by the Rocky Horror cultists, who felt they were being manipulated by the Fox publicity machine. An attempt to show the film at New York's Waverly Theater, birthplace of the Rocky Horror cult, proved disastrous and led to a scathing editorial in the Village Voice entitled "Mock Rocky," deriding this prefabricated attempt to create another Rocky Horror. Outsiders seemingly had no interest in the film either, and it vanished into home video obscurity. And that is pretty much where Shock Treatment's reputation lies today. When the film is mentioned at all nowadays, it is used as a cautionary example of why a studio should never, ever try to intentionally create a so-called "cult" movie. The history of Shock Treatment, one would be tempted to say, has been written. Its fate is sealed. The verdict is in, and it's guilty. Right?

Well, possibly. But every defendant is entitled to the benefit of counsel, right? That's where I step in.

When we first started throwing out potential movie titles for this series, one of Joe's suggestions was The Great Muppet Caper, which would have made for a great case study, but I decided that I'd rather tackle the Muppets' third cinematic outing, 1984's The Muppets Take Manhattan, since it represented something of an end of an era. It was also, for whatever reason, the only one of the three that I didn't see in theaters. (I guess I thought I had outgrown them or something, because I didn't lobby to see it the way I did with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the same year.) As for the first two, I have to take my mother's word for it that I was taken to see The Muppet Movie at the tender age of five (going on six) because I have no clear recollection of it, but I have no such problem with The Great Muppet Caper. In fact, one of my earliest memories of going to the movies was the mob scene at a kiddie matinee of that film in the summer of 1981. But even that didn't make as much of an impression on me as seeing the melting faces at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was released just two weeks earlier. As I recall, my mother was beside herself when that scene came up, but I thought it was just dandy (which probably explains why I was chomping at the bit to see Temple of Doom three years later).

Looking back on it now, it's hard to believe how much I was at the mercy of my parents when it came to going to the movies, yet that clearly was the case. In general, the Clarks went as a family unit to all the big "event" films like E.T., Ghostbusters and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which -- along with the Superman, Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones and Back to the Future series -- made up the bulk of our movie-going diet. If there were children's films to be seen, though, our father opted out of them, which was how he managed to escape the ravages of Annie, Supergirl, The Goonies, Howard the Duck or anything that was even vaguely animated. (Not that there were many animated films of note in the early '80s. I don't even think we saw The Fox and the Hound.) That policy also extended to the Muppet movies, which may explain why my mother decided to give The Muppets Takes Manhattan a pass. Having run the gauntlet on The Great Muppet Caper, she may have simply declined to do so again.

As a result, I didn't see The Muppets Take Manhattan (hereafter TMTM) until about a decade later when I was in college and experienced a resurgence of interest in the work of Jim Henson. The main catalyst for this was a 1994 PBS documentary called The World of Jim Henson, which -- in tandem with the book Jim Henson: The Works -- The Art, the Magic, the Imagination by Christopher Finch -- opened my eyes up to the man's artistry in a way that was entirely unexpected. Both were filled with detailed accounts of his career before the creation of Sesame Street and The Muppet Show (another mainstay of my youth) and his attempts to branch out into more adult fare like his 1965 short Time Piece (which was nominated for an Academy Award for best live-action short feature) and an experimental TV film from 1969 called The Cube. Then there were later efforts like the ill-fitting "Dregs and Vestiges" sketches from the first season of Saturday Night Live and 1982's The Dark Crystal, which was such an ambitious undertaking that Henson (who had helmed The Great Muppet Caper by himself) co-directed it with Frank Oz. Eager to build on its success with a project all his own, he decided to turn the reins of TMTM entirely over to Oz, who even took a screenplay credit on what was to be Henson's last big-screen outing with his signature characters.