Upping the Dante

“Genital mutilation, per se, is not my kind of thing. And in close-up, that’s worse. And in a Lars Von Trier movie, it seems like it would be unbearable.” ~ Joe Dante, on why he hasn’t rushed to see ANTICHRIST.

The subject came up when Fiona pointed out that the serial killer’s lair in THE HOWLING, decorated with scary art and news cuttings, was really the first of its kind, giving birth to a genre staple and cliche which LVT’s genital-mutilating art-house horrorshow eagerly embraces. I suggested Von Trier ought to be paying Dante royalties. Dante shuddered slightly.

All this by way of prologue to the fact that part one of my Dante interview is now up at The Auteurs’ Notebook. Many thanks to the Great Man.

Books #2: Diary of a Balaban

The Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary, by Bob Balaban.

Odd that I should choose this as an influential film book from my formative days? I, who enjoy slapping Spielberg from time to time? Ah, but CLOSE ENCOUNTERS still strikes me as a lovely thing — maybe I get cross with SS because I want him to be better, because I know he can be.

This slender tome gave the young me a glimpse into the convoluted makings of a blockbuster movie (the Star Wars book/magazine that linked Lucas’ pulp space opera with everything from SILENT RUNNING to METROPOLIS to FREAKS was also helpful) and was amusingly written t0 boot. Before you’re too harsh on me, remember I was about 11.

Same book, different title.

Balaban is a fascinating figure — a jobbing actor in everything from Seinfeld (Costanza leers at his teenage daughter and costs Jerry a TV deal) to CATCH-22 (”It’s good practice!”), he later became a director (of PARENTS, the Lynchian ’50s-set comedy-Gothic, in which one can exult to Randy Quaid saying “You can be yourself in the dark…”) and a producer for his friend Robert Altman (GOSFORD PARK, in which he also plays a producer).

BB played Truffaut’s interpreter in CE3K, which gave him lots of lines which are basically just translations of Truffaut’s. They could have just been exposition or repetition, but BB infuses them with his own character’s feelings. Essentially the job gave him a great vantage point to watch a super-production in the making, and he covers the unfolding story with an appealing self-deprecating wit.

[Spielberg] asks me to say a couple of words in French. I say, “Il y a avait longtemps depuis que j’aie parla Francais, et si vous me donnez ce role, je devrais beaucoup etudier. En effet, je ne sais pas si je opurrais le faire.” I say this in very rapid French which I have been rehearsing all morning. Roughly translated, it means: “I haven’t spoken French in years, and if you give me the job I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it.” Spielberg is impressed. He doesn’t speak French.

Also, this bit about dining in Wyoming with Truffaut:

All the food is “chicken-fried.” It is impossible to translate chicken-fried steak into meaningful French. Truffaut seems nice. He keeps asking for vegetables, and the sad little waitress keeps saying, “We have cottage cheese.” I, of course, speak my normally fluent English to the waitress, who thinks I am French too, and keeps repeating everything I say in English, in English.

It’s kind of like Woody Allen, but true.

Paper Round

New review up over at the Auteurs’ Notebook, of Aleksei German Jnr’s PAPER SOLDIER, which I caught at the recent Edinburgh Film Festival. Capsule version: I liked it!

Tijuana Bible Bashers

Tijuana Bibles, for those not in the know, were little tiny small-press comic book pamphlets of a pornographic nature, popular particularly in the ’30s. They generally featured caricatures of figures from popular culture, movie stars and so on, making them the depression-era version of today’s slash fiction.

History is silent on this, but I’m pretty sure they were produced by the state, like the prole pornography in 1984, only with the purpose of turning the nation off sex, thereby reducing the excess population. Warning: what follows is not pleasant. In the interests of taste, I’m not reproducing any of the full on erection and penetration images, since Shadowplay is a blog intended for family entertainment, and in the interests of sanity I’m not going to show you the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy or Popeye engaged in risque byplay — some things are sacred, or, viewed from another angle, nauseating.

But how about this?

It’s a catchy title, I’ll grant you. And if you’re wondering if the anonymous author is going to explore the rhyming potential of the lead character’s name and species, I can answer that question. He is. This is also the only Tijuana Bible I’ve perused to feature male-on-male action (drake-on-drake, to be precise), with a plot that basically has a horny Donald D (with Pluto as pimp) test the limits of his heterosexuality with a dragged-up ladydrake, establishing beyond doubt that performing anal sex and receiving oral sex are fine, but performing oral would make him a queer. I’m glad that’s all straightened out.

And aren’t you glad I’m presenting this in synopsis, rather than in blow-by-blow panel reproduction? Trust me, the image of a rampant Donald with outsized humanoid member is one that would haunt you to your collective mausoleums.

Ingrid Bergman. I never knew she was a sort of human bust, truncated at the ribcage, and mounted on a brick. I guess all her walking and gesturing was done by stand-ins. It’s Hollywood’s best-kept secret. This is the story of how “Reberto” Rossellini makes Ingrid a star — in stag films. It’s the kind of ironic twist of fate one would never see coming, but for the fact that this is a Tijuana Bible and therefore it’s the only thing that can possibly happen.

The idea of a ventriloquist act becoming a smash hit on the radio sounds like a surreal joke, and not even a very good one, but it actually happened. The idea of the dummy, possessed of an animating consciousness of his own, being fitted with a vast phallus hewn from oak, and going forth to test it on living human beings, sounds like something from Michael Redgrave’s deepest, gin-sodden nightmares. Fortunately it never happened, except in this literary effort by ‘Feelma Box.’ Perhaps related to Edgar Box, the pseudonym used by Gore Vidal when writing crime novels? Do pseudonyms have families? Do monocled dummies have a chance with Carole Lombard?

I’d like to think the answer to both questions is “no,” but this T.B. says different.

Don’t know who Evelyn is meant to be, but the girl under the car is Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) and the dapper chap with the gun is John Dillinger (Johnny Depp). What follows could have made an entertaining DVD extra for Michael Mann’s PUBLIC ENEMIES, except for the disturbingly horrid artwork and even more appalling dialogue. In the world of the T.B., you’ll want to know, a large (or “brutal”, or sometimes “butal”) penis, is known colloquially as a “kidney disturber.” Ain’t that sweet. Excuse me while I disinfect my eyes and rub Germolene on my soul.

A South Sea idyll with Dorothy Lamour and Jon Hall. What could be nicer, more innocent, more… oh. The dialogue isn’t exactly Mankiewicz, is it? Or at least, not prime Mankiewicz. What else do we have to torture you with? Oh yeah.

Inevitably: Jean Harlot. Sometimes the stars would be identified by spoofy nom-de-guerres, like Mae Breast, or Sylvia Kidney. This was clearly not to avoid lawsuits, since the T.B. merchandisers were strictly under-the-counter operators anyway, nor was it to protect the innocent, since these guys inhabit a mindset where such a thing cannot exist — innocence would appear as a black inky nebula upon the page, an unknowable nothingness into which smut vanishes as if into a deep well — but simply to show off the riotous glee in language of these unsung Voltaires of the funnybook.

I particularly like how this guy spells “commuist” in a funny way, for no reason. And then does it again, like he really believes that’s how you spell it. You would only get that kind of genius in the kind of author who thinks the world really wants a pornographic comic book starring frickin’ STALIN.

Tijuana Bibles open, as they say, a window onto history, through which we can see that history is a foetid heap of rutting morons. In honour of those nameless, giftless artists, and their important work sterilizing a great nation, I’m opening my doors to similar works, starring the movie gods and goddesses of today. My only rule is that any submissions should be the kind of thing that such stars might reasonably be expected to chuckle over, rather than stare at, glassy-eyed with terror. I know you Shadowplayers are a talented bunch, let’s see your fan-fic!

The Quick Change Artist

Where can you see Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd in the same movie? And throw in Roscoe Arbuckle, Jackie Coogan and Rudolph Valentino as well.

CHARACTER STUDIES is basically a home movie by Carter de Haven, rich bloke and future John Huston producer. Aa lot of care has gone into it, and it has a very nice central conceit, which unfortunately means that none of the actors interact or even share screen time. If he’d just filmed everybody hitting each other with sausages he’d have had a terrible pointless film, instead of this witty and elegant one, but we’d have gotten to see Fatty Arbuckle smacking Valentino with a salami. Sometimes you can overthink things.

A thousand thanks to Steven McNicoll for alerting me to this one.