Sweet Smell of Limerwrecks
More film-flam at Limerwrecks, reservoir of doggerel.
Some of the stars of THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS are given the rhyming treatment this time, here and here, and Thelma Ritter’s heroic turn in PICK-UP ON SOUTH STREET is memorialized here.
When Sam Fuller’s helming your noir,
The film is a battlefield – war!
He goes over the top
And still doesn’t stop
‘Cause he knows film is worth fighting for.
April 23, 2011 at 2:25 pm
Off-topic (but of earth-shattering importance) — Skidoo is coming to DVD in July!
April 23, 2011 at 3:28 pm
WOW. Pan and scanned it’s a mess, like any Preminger movie cropped, but it’s still so full of weirdness as to be pretty irresistible. I suspect that in WS it’ll still be a mess, but a far more elegant one.
April 23, 2011 at 6:33 pm
You mean Preminger actually made a more deranged film than HURRY SUNDOWN?
Hope this one is better than TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON.
April 23, 2011 at 11:05 pm
Skidoo is sui generis — even for Otto. He’d really gone whole hog for the “Youth Culture.” He even planned to make a film of John Hershey’s “Too Far To WalK’ with Amy Taubin in the lead. But that evaporated. Anyhoo, Otto took some really good acid, rounded up an incredible cast and shot Doran William Cannnon’s script (He also wrote Brewster McCloud)
It was supposed be a film in which “The Establishment”, represented by an impriosned mobster played by ackie Gleason is freed by acid (whichh he gets from Austin Pendleton) as he escapes from prison (in a agbage can atached to a set of balloons — don’t ask!) Once hom he discovers his daughter (Alexandra Hay) has taken up with a hippie names Stas (John Phillip Law). Soon old cronies (Groucho Marx, Butch)and new ones (Frankie Avalon, Donayele Luna)are converging on his life to the delight of his wife (Carol Channing!)
All that and songs by harry Nillsson.
My boyfriend Bill Reed was living in John Phllip Law’s basement at the time (hey it was the REAL 60′s) and recalls how a bus from Preminger’s company would come every day to scoop up the participants and take them to the set.
Read all about it in his memoir Early Plastic (go to Amazon or Ebay for a copy) He recounts a tea time chat between Donayle and Nico speaking what he calls “their mittle-Matian accents.” best of all is his bad acid trip with John Phillip Law’s girlgriend at that time — the one and only Barbara Parkins — talking him down from it.
Now if that isn’t the beating heart of the 60′s I don’t know what is.
April 23, 2011 at 11:11 pm
Interestingly, those filmmakers who took acid and then tried to film it didn’t tend to arrive at anything very convincingly trippy. Polanski’s nightmares seem the most authentic of the whole crowd. Fellini has too much fun with his imagination, Corman can’t keep away from the optical printer and stock footage, and Otto is just crazy, but he has the script to go with it.
April 24, 2011 at 3:58 am
Theresa Harris
April 24, 2011 at 11:39 am
Thanks!