CRITERION 545

Criterion Files #545: The Redefinition of the American Dream in “Easy Rider”

As a relatively young person, far too young to speak meaningfully about an important era of American culture, it’s difficult for me to ascribe any sense of value even unto my own words about a picture that encapsulates and represents an alternate ideology of real American freedom than what we consider as being truly “free.” When we think of freedom we think of rights and when we think of American we think of the dream. We have the right to be happy and we have the freedoms to pursue it.

For many, that happiness lies in security; the safety and comfort of a steady job to pay for a nice home in a nice community with nice schools to raise one’s, hopefully, nice children brought up with the mindset of the popularly nice American ideals. For others, it lies in the open availability for one to earn a living however one chooses. To a degree, there are no questions asked; you can earn your living by whatever profession you can afford to pursue regardless of your background.

This is what, I imagine, America represented (and hopefully continues to represent) to the majority of the world for the better part of the early through the mid-20th century. I can honestly only speak though, of what I see in movies. Although, again, for the better part of the early through the mid-20th century it’s hard to find reason that this was not the popular perception of an ideal American upbringing because of those very films. Films represent one of two things: Reality or fantasy. In either case, we either were precisely what we appeared to be in movies or we wished we were.

However, to a particular kind of individual, and one with a growing popularity in the post-war 1960s, those pursuits encompassed the very antithesis of freedom. To them, freedom wasn’t a right so much as the objective. Where most saw homes of typical American values others saw prison bars or shackles. For these individuals those titular films (and television programs) that dominated the national consciousness of the healthy American lifestyle displayed a dream void of expression or adventure. These individuals wanted to be free of as much enforced responsibility as they possibly could; and a movie that tapped in to that couldn’t hurt.

With that growing switch in the pop-culture mindset of living the dream a small group of renegade actors and producers would collaborate on a project that would not only become one of the most profitable pictures in history, but would be one of the most powerful driving forces of a new era of American film culture that was both bold in content and free of the dominant Hollywood studio system.

A Different America Delayed

Leading up to the release of Easy Rider in 1969 American film, even within the studio system, was transitioning to accommodate the new generation of American minds. The pictures of Stanley Kubrick can be looked to as a possible turning point at the outset of the 1960s when referring to a change in what the American public was willing to accept and pay money to see. Though, due to the fact that Kubrick was a one-of-a-kind  talent the success of his pictures was most likely matched to him and the unique experience his pictures alone could offer versus a distinguishable marker of where the American public’s head was headed.

In 1967 Warner Bros and MGM would release Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate which are the two films most oft-considered the first prominent contributions to the soon-to-become New Hollywood of American cinema. Not necessarily in that they were the first pictures of the bunch that displayed something particularly daring or different, but that they did so while drawing in massive crowds. However, unlike Easy Rider, which would hit two years later, they had the backing of major studios for production and a considerable budget to boot. Easy Riderwould be the first mostly independently financed feature with a renegade pedigree and a budget at a fraction of that of its studio counterparts to go on and garner the kind of box-office returns typically reached only by the films released by the major Hollywood studios.

As the saying often goes (especially recently), America voted with their dollar and the counter-culture id solidified its place in American cinema.

What’s particularly interesting about Easy Rider and its sensibilities considering the brash attitude of its helmer, co-star and co-writer Dennis Hopper, towards the prejudicial attitude of the Southern states against the hippy movement is its occasional display of affection and respect for the traditional American lifestyle when presented with equal respect for the alternative. One of the first encounters of Captain America (Wyatt the character’s actual name, played by Peter Fonda who also co-wrote the script) and Billy (Hopper) on their road trip through the South to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras is that of a rancher who heads a large household with a Mexican wife and numerous children. They are obviously a household with either traditional Catholic or Christian morals and offer Billy and Wyatt a place to fix their flat tire and a spot at the dinner table. It’s one of only a few brief moments in the film where the human elements of each ideology meet peacefully in the middle with both offering slight admiration for the other.

From then on it’s pretty downhill with Billy and Wyatt meeting acceptance only with like minds and an intriguing personality of an alcoholic ACLU lawyer (played famously by Jack Nicholson in his breakout role), and [sometimes] violent adversity from those not accepting of the long-haired, drug induced, free-roaming personae of the protagonists. Whether it be because of what they unintentionally represent, or because of where they place (or don’t place) value.

The New Decade, the Next Era

The next year opened up the new decade and with it came the explosion of independently financed cinema finding its audience outside of the mainstream, but bringing about mainstream success. The music documentaryWoodstock would become one of the highest grossing pictures of 1970 (though distributed by Warner Bros) and the beginnings of the blaxploitation pictures would start up over the next year or so. The frameworks of traditional American genres and their archetypes would also begin to change (most noticeably the American Western) with the release of  films like The Wild Bunch and Midnight Cowboy the same year as Easy Rider to usher in the new age.

Also, following the overwhelming financial success of Easy Rider the production team of Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider (production company named Raybert) would include a third producing personality in Steve Blauner to include the final initial in the newly formed BBS Productions, which would release their first official picture under that production company name with the 1970 film Five Easy Pieces. That film, and others over the course of the decade is what solidified Jack Nicholson as an inimitable acting force in film.

BLOOD SWEAT AND LATEX CAREER RESET

Blood, Sweat and Latex: Career Reset

For those of you new to the column, I’m recounting key experiences of my life that made me what I am today: A Special Effects Make Up Artist looking for relevance in the 21st century. I’ve dropped out of CalArtsafter my sophomore year and have moved in with up and coming Make Up Artist Mark Shostrom, who was seeking a roommate. I am nineteen years old…

I had never experienced a Motion Picture dry spot before. In fact, I hadn’t worked on a film yet. My friend, James Cummins had left and returned from Canada with Margaret Beserra, Brian Wade, Bill Sturgeon, and Henry Golas after executing the alien effects for a film entitled Strange Invaders. Although I asked to accompany them and work on the film, James told me that he didn’t feel comfortable hiring me with no professional experience. Now, back in Los Angeles, James wanted to focus on his screenplay writing and wasn’t pursing any creature effects jobs. Clueless how to get hired at any other make-up effects studio, I stayed in Pasadena, setting up in Mark Shostrom’s apartment.

Mark bid on a few small projects. One job in particular was to produce a life-sized statue in the Greco-Roman style for a commercial. We even went so far as to sculpt a maquette (a small scale model) of our proposed design, but did not land the job. Mark had also been developing some creature effects for an independent film entitled The Last Resort (which has nothing to do with the subsequent film of the same title). Although, they never seemed to be able to get their financing secured, it didn’t stop Mark and I from sculpting maquettes and doing illustrations in an attempt to get things moving ahead. It never amounted to anything.

Finally, Mark received a call from a producer named Sandy Howard, who he had worked for previously. Howard had some success with a low budget exploitation movie entitled Vice Squad and was now prepping a kind of sequel called Deadly Force. The antagonist of Vice Squad, actor, Wings Hauser, would now be the protagonist of Deadly Force. There weren’t a lot of effects required for the film, but production anticipated needing a severe bruise make-up for Wings as well as some post assault make-ups on various non descript victims.

Having been paid a little money (and I do mean a VERY little amount of money), Mark and I drove to Wings Hauser’s home in the Hollywood hills to do a simple face cast as Wings was not available to drive to Mark’s studio. It is difficult enough to do a face cast without having to transport all of the required materials and then set up in a strange environment.

The procedure is messy. Working with the soft alginate casting material and the plaster bandages used to support the mold have a tendency to dust, drip, and otherwise flick particulates around the casting area no matter how well you attempt to protect it. After the life mold is made, the nature of the alginate is to begin shrinking so plaster must be poured into it as soon as possible, and the casting process is equally as messy.

Wings had a Spanish style home with a terra cotta tile floor, so Mark and I started taping plastic garbage bags down to make clean up easier. We were led to a water source and as I filled buckets with water, Mark started gluing a plastic bald cap to Wings’ head to protect his hair from the casting materials. Mark explained the casting procedure to Wings who seemed very cool about everything and soon, it was time to begin. I poured a measure of water into the alginate, Mark mixed it and together we began spreading it across his forehead, taking it down his cheeks, under his jaw, up over his chin and mouth, and finally over his nose, taking care to leave his nostrils open so he could breath. So far, so good.

Next it was time for the plaster bandages and I began dipping the plaster infused gauze bandages into warm water and handed them to Mark as he smoothed them on the alginate. Suddenly, Wings stood up! Straight up and began flapping his arms in panic! Mark talked him back into the chair and we stripped the unfinished life mold from his face.

Red-faced and gasping, Wings apologized to us. He then told us that he had trouble breathing through his nose and thought he could just hold his breath through the entire cast! Mark explained that we could cast him with his mouth slightly open so he could breathe and we started the entire process all over again. From that day on, I was never a big fan of life casting.

A week or so later, Mark had to execute some victim make ups for still photos to be used on a police evidence board and he asked if I wanted to be one of the victims. I went to downtown Los Angeles with him where they twisted a wire coat hanger around my throat (safely). Mark then applied scarring prosthetics and color. I lay down in a dirty alley and had my photo taken. In the final film, there are so many photos on the board that you can’t make out the one of me post-assault, but you can see a very clear photo of me prior to the attack. If for some reason, you decide you need to see Deadly Force, I’m the victim wearing the yellow shirt on the photo wall! It was my first appearance in motion pictures…well, kind of.

After Deadly Force, things got really slow and soon I found myself working for Bank of America in an office reviewing “Versateller” ATM card requests. The people were nice, the money was okay, but ultimately I was miserable. There seemed to be no end in sight, and I certainly didn’t want a banking career. Meanwhile, my car had been giving me so much trouble that I couldn’t afford to fix it and I found myself taking a bus to and from work.

They were dark times.

One evening, I received a call from my mother (whom I hadn’t spoken to in months). She said that she had a “feeling” that things weren’t going well in California and offered to pay for me to come back home an regroup. She didn’t have to ask twice. I sold my car, packed my things and moved back home.

Initially, my thought was that I would give up the arts, and movies, and go back to what I thought I wanted to do – become a paleontologist. My girlfriend, Tracy, had already been attending the University of New Orleans, so it made sense that I would apply to the geology department and reboot my life. Funny how things worked out.

I spent two semesters in the geology department at UNO, but my failing grades in Chemistry and Algebra made me realize that I would never have what it takes to be any kind of a scientist. By my third semester, I had switched into Fine Arts and learned, again the hard way, that I had no interest in being an expressive Fine Artist. I wanted to make monsters.

Out of desperation, I put a bunch of photos together and sent them to Dick Smith. One afternoon, my mother called me to the phone. Dick had called me. We spoke for a long time as he looked over my photos, offered advice, but most of all encouragement. He told me that I had what it took to be a Special Effects Make-Up Artist and I should continue refining my work until an opportunity presented itself. Needless to say, when I hung up the phone, I was elated and reinvigorated to pursue my love of creature making.

By this time, I had had a string of jobs at the Hilton Hotel, Fox Photo (the best job on the planet), and finally working for Tracy’s father at Driller’s Electric of Harvey. I had two more semesters of college in order to get my BFA, and then, I got the call. It was Mark Shostrom.

Mark had finally landed a decent-sized job on a film called Ghost Soldiers that had to do with the reanimation of Civil War corpse/ghosts. There were a slew of “gags” (one-off tricks to simulate wounding and killing of characters) that had to be designed as well. I said good-bye to my family and Tracy, and got back on the plane to Los Angeles.

I was finally in the minor leagues.

BAKER STREET IRREGULARS

Baker Street Irregulars

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the Baker Street Irregulars are a gang of street kids who Holmes sometimes employs to help him with his cases. In modern life, the Baker Street Irregulars are an invitation-only society who only award membership and the accompanying customary “Irregular Shilling” to eminent Sherlockian scholars. Isaac Asimov and Neil Gaiman are both members. The group convenes for a fancy dinner once a year, and hosts other Sherlock-oriented activities open to the public.

THE ANNUAL MOBY DICK MARATHON

The Annual Moby Dick Marathon

Every year, the New Bedford Whaling Museum hosts a marathon continuous reading of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, among other Melville-related activities including an interactive game of “Stump the Scholars,” over a three day weekend. Nothing fishy about that.

THE KNIGHTS OF KING ARTHUR

The Knights of King Arthur

These boy clubs seem much like the Boy Scouts in some ways — except way less popular and much nerdier. From a pamphlet entitled “The Knights of King Arthur: How to Begin and What to Do,” which you can read in its entirety here: “There comes a time when boys begin to outgrow mere physical activities, boisterous play and the desire to parade in uniform, and like to get together as indoors friends, to talk and plan and work together, and to feel exclusive and perhaps a bit superior. When they have come to this age they are ready to organize a Castle.”

THE JANE AUSTIN FESTIVAL

The Jane Austen Festival

Every September, thousands of Austenophiles descend upon Bath, England, to spend a weekend dressed up as their favorite Jane Austen character. The events, organized by the Jane Austen Centre, range from promenading to eating to dancing and perusing the wares at the Country Fayre.

TOWEL DAY

Towel Day

Every May 25th, Douglas Adams fans everywhere celebrate Towel Day by carrying a towel around with them. According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a towel is pretty much the most important item you can have, and after all, “any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

THE RUSSIAN GODFATHERS

CRITERION 546

The most difficult thing about watching seminal, groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting movies is that it’s impossible to see them, feel them, or experience them the way they were in the moment, before they became influential enough to seem almost unexceptional by retrospective comparison. It’s difficult to marvel at the audacious camera angles or fragmented narrative of Citizen Kane in an age where Gaspar Noe and Guillermo Arriaga exist, or be shocked by the expertly-crafted profanity of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in a post-David Mamet world. These movies may remain strong and, in other ways, timeless, but even with the very best, the “moment” of greatness is lost by the sheer force of its effect on cinema that came after. Films, after all, aren’t made in a vacuum. They are the constant subject of influence, and rarely anything influences a film more than another great film.

Criterion’s 2009 interview with director Bob Rafelson is introduced with a quote by Roger Ebert, explaining the phenomenon of the inevitable failure of attempting to understand greatness retrospectively in the case of Rafelson’s second feature film, Five Easy Pieces:

“It is difficult to explain today how much Bobby Dupea meant to the film’s first audiences. I was at the New York Film Festival for the premiere of Five Easy Pieces, and I remember the explosive laughter, the deep silences, the stunned attention as the final shot seemed to continue forever, and then the ovation.

“We had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy. Five Easy Pieces was a fusion of the personal cinema of John Cassavetes and the new indie movement that was tentatively emerging.”

The broad understanding of why New Hollywood should be appreciated is based on a basic assumption that films have an essential relationship to their context. The great works of New Hollywood ostensibly captured a moment, a sensation, an ideology, an experience, a sensibility, and so much more. This thesis sounds simple and agreeable enough, but in a way it also subverts an understanding of how cinema is often conventionally thought to be acceptably appreciated. For instance, if great cinema is great storytelling (an equivalence I find distressingly reductive), then implied in this assertion is that there exists an objective standard for great storytelling that should be transcendent of context: great films, in other words, should be timeless according to such a proposition.

But that description couldn’t be further away from why New Hollywood is so continually revered today. Titles from the era, or movement (whatever you want to call it), can certainly be enjoyed in any number of ways without context, but if the capturing of a brief but powerful cultural moment is what makes New Hollywood exceptional, then these films are revered today because of their preservation of that moment. New Hollywood cinema is not timeless. It is time-dependent.

Freedom Of/Freedom From

In last week’s analysis of Easy Rider, Adam Charles observed the evolving notion of “freedom” that informed the counterculture:

“Where most saw homes of typical American values others saw prison bars or shackles. For these individuals those titular films (and television programs) that dominated the national consciousness of the healthy American lifestyle displayed a dream void of expression or adventure. These individuals wanted to be free of as much enforced responsibility as they possibly could; and a movie that tapped in to that couldn’t hurt.”

I’d like to take Adam’s perceptive point a step further in connecting this sentiment with New Hollywood. Films like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces did not only express this “freedom from convention” mentality only in the narratives of people who seek those freedoms, but rather the proverbial “revolution” occurred through both form and content: filmmakers exercised a similar mentality, that freedom is escaping from conventional means of cinematic expression and storytelling and seeking out alternative, liberating ways of doing so. As Ebert observes, not only was Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) a character that audiences and critics had rarely seen before, but the structuring of the film itself: mixing comedy and drama without regard the consistent expectations of genre, long and unexpected stretches of plot-less silence and reflection, the dreaded ambiguous ending.

This understanding is where the essential time-specificity of a film like Five Easy Pieces comes into play. Rafleson’s film remains quite affecting and, from my personal experience having seen it over the weekend for the first time, great in a way that perhaps defies words. This does not necessarily mean the film has aged gracefully. One major complaint about the films of New Hollywood, or simply the films of this time writ large (think, for example, of the overwhelming “hipness” of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) coupled with its unapologetic objectification of women), is the lack of strong female characters or great female roles despite the incredible amount of female talent available (it is perhaps out of this urgency that Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rapewas first published in 1974).

Bobby’s dissatisfaction with the (many, and diverse) women in his life is exercised as simply an element in his dissatisfaction of life and people ad infinitum, and the character is hardly situated here as justified in his treatment of people (he is frequently reminded that he’s an asshole, as the asshole protagonist was perhaps another breakthrough of New Hollywood), but Bobby’s desperate search for freedom is certainly at the expense of others who are not immune to his affect on their life and who simply can’t get up and leave at a moment’s notice like he can.

The Easy Pieces

Five Easy Pieces is a far more devastating film than Easy Rider, and that’s because it is by contrast a counter-cultural film that exists without the counterculture (in fact, besides notable exceptions like Easy Rider, the characters in much of New Hollywood cinema were rarely those whose counter-cultural sentiment was supposedly being directly reflected). For a film that specifically needs time-context in order to fully understand its relevance to the year it was made, Five Easy Pieces is a strangely anachronistic film, positing Bobby as a lone wanderer without an outlet or a group with which he can productively transcend a shared discontent and dissatisfaction. He is a case study in the imprisoning former definition of “freedom” Adam Charles referred to.

And this is where Ebert’s observation of the “vulgar and literate” aspects of Five Easy Pieces enter the picture, for it is a film that, in terms of both its structure and subject matter, distinctly separates its elements into the vulgar and then the literate. Bobby lives in a world where there is only low culture (embodied by Karen Black’s Rayette) and high culture (encapsulated by his family home and their enculturation of classical music). With such stark distinctions, the third option – of “counterculture” – neither exists nor can it even be envisioned. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film’s use of music. Bobby’s life as a day laborer, “the vulgar,” is accompanied by low-rent country music, and his cultured family life by the eponymous five “easy” pieces. Nowhere to be found is the popular music that fueled the fire of the early sixties and seventies, which was featured so prominently in the iconography of Easy Rider.

Bobby proudly bridges the two, illustrated literally by the famous image of him playing piano on the back of a pickup truck. But a moment that’s more overlooked, I think, is where Bobby briefly performs (before an abrupt interruption) a mock burlesque show in reference to his only paying job as a musician. This is one of the rare moments of Five Easy Pieces where Bobby has that unmistakable Nicholsonian smile. It’s not high culture, it’s not low culture, but a wonderful and irreverent hybrid of the two. Both because it’s fun and it gives high culture the middle finger, it provides Bobby a sad, reflective, fleeting moment of meaning before the interruption returns him to the sulk of social strangulation.

Bobby Dupea seems less a product of the counter-cultural sixties than, as Ebert alluded, a character of an early Cassavetes movie like half-black half-white jazz musician Ben Carruthers walking alone in the final shot ofShadows: a bifurcated character caught between two worlds, wandering aimlessly, but decidedly and confrontationally out of tune with his surroundings. Bobby Dupea does first play Chopin in the back of a truck, but there’s some palpable ragtime pulsating underneath

BLOOD SWEAT AND LATEX THE JOURNEY OF A 1000 MILES

Blood, Sweat and Latex: The Journey of a Thousand Miles…

For those new to the column, I am revisiting important events in my life that have made me what I am today: A Special Effects Make Up Artist seeking relevance in the 21st century.

You start at the bottom, right? You pay your dues. You put in the hours and the effort and experience the pain and frustration of being a novice. Yep, that just about sums it all up.

It was September of 1984, and I was in South Pasadena working on a project for Mark Shostrom entitled Ghost Soldiers*. The plot seemed simple enough: A group of young inexperienced soldiers, led by a seasoned drill instructor, is taken to a remote, rural area for a training exercise. They aren’t prepared to face a small battalion of resurrected Confederate, Civil War soldiers intent on killing them.

We would be providing the Confederate Ghost Soldiers, as well as the make-up effects gags (the on-camera illusions to simulate the scripted wounding and killing of specific characters). The crew was small by today’s standards, but for Mark Shostrom, at that time, having four full-time artists assisting him was a big deal.

Bart Mixon was from Houston, Texas and had been a life-long make-up effects enthusiast. His twin brother, Brett, had moved his way into visual effects. I have no idea how Bart and Mark met each other, but other than Mark, Bart was much more experienced than the rest of us.

Mark had met the next crew member, Ed Ferrell, in North Carolina when he was on location for a slasher film entitled The Mutilator. My understanding is that Ed worked on a commercial fishing boat prior to his indoctrination into make-up effects – which is why he affectionately referred to Mark as “Cappy,” and the nickname stuck for years.

I rounded out the crew, with my very limited experience; however, as the cliché goes: what I lacked in experience, I made up for in enthusiasm. The hours were incredibly long, up to 16 hours a day, sometimes six days a week. My pay was $200 a week. No taxes taken out, just a weekly paycheck. I didn’t complain. I was working on my first motion picture.

We started pre-production in Mark’s studio, which was upstairs in an old building above a commercial retail store. Initially, I was asked to do some illustrations to go along with a test make-up, and a maquette Mark had fabricated using a commercial skeleton model kit.

I drew a few pictures, I recall one of a Ghost Soldier attack, and another of the main female character, Melanie, degenerating, becoming older, like David Bowie’s character in The Hunger.

The film was being directed by Armand Mastrionni, who had previously directed He Knows You’re Alone, and Mark would send photos of our designs to him for feedback, but I don’t ever recall him actually visiting the studio to look at the work in person.

Since we knew that the goal was to have the Ghost Soldiers appear as thin as humanly possible, the casting department began sending us very thin performers for us to life cast in order to produce the positives we would need to begin sculpting and fabricating the suits. I remember thinking how strange that they actually sent us a few performers who were very mature in age. They would be required not only to wear an over-the-head mask, but also a body suit that would go from their necks to their waists. It was going to be physically strenuous for sure.

Mark, Bart, and I began sculpting heads. The absolute truth is that Mark and Bart were much more proficient sculptors and I only ended up sculpting one of the heads, but I didn’t mind. I was learning so many techniques including the manufacturing of soft, urethane molds using a material called Ad-Rub (For any of you “veterans” who might be reading this, you remember what a pain in the butt Ad-Rub was!)

It was decided that to produce the suits, we would sculpt “rib cage forms,” cast them in latex, glue them onto spandex undersuits, run foam latex, and then spatulate it onto the fabric. Once the foam was “gelled” we would sculpt texture directly into it and then bake it and paint it. It was the fastest, most effective, and the most inexpensive way to make them and I believe we made at least 6 complete suits.

Although it may sound like it was nothing but work, nothing could be further from the truth. Being inexperienced, and a somewhat “immature” crew, there were times when we would do very irresponsible (but hilarious) things. I can recall one night, very late, a “water fight” broke out that started with spraying each other with spritz-bottles that escalated into throwing gallon buckets of water at each other until the floor in the studio and the hallways were drenched. What we didn’t realize was that the shop below us sold custom, hand-made wool sweaters and…well….you can fill in the blanks.

The landlord was concerned that there was a water leak somewhere in the building. We never let on.

A couple of folks were brought in to assist when the workload got heavy towards the height of the construction. Brian Moore, who was a make up artist that had done some work on Tales from the Darkside television show assisted us with mold making and casting, and costumer Lisa Jensen came on to design and build the rotted Confederate uniforms for the Ghost Soldiers.

Aside from casting and fabricating Ghost Soldiers, we also cast some of the military cadets including Branford Bancroft (Anne Bancroft’s son) and Bobby Di Cicco (the dancing boyfriend from 1941). We cast Branford’s chest to do an effect where one of the Ghost Soldiers after having his hand blown off by an M-16 machine gun, uses the remaining fragmented bones as a stabbing weapon.

Mark designed the effect by sculpting a Ghost Soldier hand in a fist pose, molding it in Ad-Rub, running the lower part in fiberglass, then producing multiple wax “fists” that could be filled with fuller’s earth and squibbed to blow apart to reveal the fiberglass bones. A jointed, soft foam-latex and polyfoam copy of the damaged arm was rod-puppeted to strike Branford. To show the bones actually piercing the skin and drawing a gush of blood, an arm with fiberglass bones was driven into a foam latex/soft polyfoam chest with a blood cavity just below the surface.

By the time we got onto set, we were all pretty strung out from working the incredible hours we had in the studio. My recollection now is that we must have been on set for a week to shoot all of the scenes with the Ghost Soldiers so it was a fairly brief time  for us (honestly, I cannot remember…for all I know we could have been there for a month).

The shoot was primarily at night on a location in a park in Malibu Canyon. The rest of the cast included Maxwell Caufield (from Grease II), Levar Burton (Yes! In the years between Roots and Star Trek: The Next Generation), Talia Balsam (Martin Balsam’s daughter), and as the hard-as-nails army sergeant, Nichelle Nichols (THAT Nichelle Nichols!). Working so many nights in succession can have a strange affect and being new to this kind of work, I was unprepared for the resulting delusional state from the fatigue.

As for the night-to-night work, I can just recall pulling masks onto the performers we had cast at the beginning and then running after them with aerosol medical adhesive and moss to cover any damage they were doing to the suits. Mark had also read that Dick Smith had had some success putting “Pax Paint” (a term Dick coined for the mixture of prosthetic adhesive and acrylic paint) into a Preval sprayer, which consisted of a glass bottle topped with a can of compressed air effectively becoming a custom spray paint. We would spray them once, and then the paint would gum up the feed tube and the unit would become worthless. Then, we would have to open the jar and use the paints with sponges and brushes! After 28 years, I’d still like to know how Dick Smith made that work.

After principle photography wrapped in mid-November, we all sort of went our separate ways. I have no idea what happened to Ed Ferrell (to this day!). I ended up staying a few days with James Cummins before going back home for the holidays.

“Okay,” he said, “you’ve done it!” “Done what?” I asked. “You’ve become a professional! You’ve worked on a movie set!” I was a bit confused at his reaction. “Yeah?” I asked him.

“Well…now, the next time I get a show, I’ll hire you!”

And that’s all it took. I had paid my dues and had completed my first step. I was a professional make-up effects artist.

*Ghost Soldiers was released as The Supernaturals – I can’t remember if it received a theatrical release or not.

Next Time: “Brother could you haunt this HOUSE?”

CULTURE WARRIOR 32

Culture Warrior: The Past and (Possible) Future of Harry Potter

That the final Harry Potter film became the biggest opening weekend of all time seemed only natural and inevitable. Something so monumentally culturally pervasive could have only gone out with a loud bang. After all, it is – as I’ve been repeatedly reminded – the most successful movie franchise of all time, adapted from a series of books whose sales history rivals that of The Holy Bible.

Yet unlike some head scratch-inducing huge opening weekends of the more uninspired entries of blockbusting franchises who rival Harry Potter in their monetary intake but not their longevity (Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest) and the former reigning champ whose buzz was accompanied by fascination with the untimely death of a star (The Dark Knight), the mass participation in the cultural event that was the release of Deathly Hollows Part 2 won’t likely be rivaled anytime soon. The Harry Potter films simultaneously represent the inevitable logical extent of franchise filmmaking as much as it is exceptional and anomalous in this same regard.

The Past

When the first Harry Potter film was released in 2001, it seemed like a kid-specific alternative to the first entry in the Oscar-beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy, released only a few months after. Chris Columbus was certainly an adept enough director-for-hire in terms of introducing the world of Harry Potter, but it became clear that the franchise had to change directions if it was to transcend beyond the stigmatized category of children’s entertainment. According to English professor Greg Garrett on last week’s Reject Radio, Columbus’s films suffered from a comprehensive devotion to the source material, which would prove to become a problem as the films would be adapted from longer books (the 161-minute Chamber of Secrets, the longest film, was based on a 341-page book, one of the shortest in the series).

In hiring Alfonso Cuarón to do The Prisoner of Azkaban (and releasing the unrivaled favorite entry amongst movie fans, but arguably the least loyal adaptation for book devotees, or so I’ve heard), Warner Bros. showed, as Dan Kois argues in this piece from Slate, how a Harry Potter film could both be the work of an auteur and stillbe a Harry Potter film. But the distinction to be made with this entry is the term “a Harry Potter film.” These were no longer just adaptations. The notion of making a loyal adaptation of one of these tomes was impossible. They became films, and a phenomenon all their own.

But to me, the next move in the Harry Potter franchise was the worst. Despite the fact that the films were funded by Warner Bros. and despite the reality that Harry Potter’s American fanbase, as a force of nature, certainly rivals its UK counterpart, the Harry Potter films are – or, at least, eventually became – specifically British films. It seems only natural that the migrating directors chair of the franchise would finally approach a fellow Brit. But hiring Mike Newell, who embodies the exact opposite of Cuarón, was a regressive move. Newell, like Cuarón, is “versatile,” but only in the most superficial sense. Instead of taking a signature visionary style to a variety of work, Newell approaches everything from gangster films to Gabriel García Márquez adaptations with a droll and uninspired touch that’s as bland as English cuisine. As engrossing as any adaptation of Rowling’s books may by the story alone, The Goblet of Fire as a film felt like a step backward into Columbus territory, except without the patient world-shaping or the “excuse” of being a kid’s film.

The series finally found some cohesion with fellow Englishman David Yates, who possessed a compelling visual style similar to Cuarón’s while emerging from television without the burden of “the auteur” (the Harry Potter series, perhaps more than any Hollywood franchise ever produced, exhibits the essential importance of the individual directorial vision, even with a collaborative medium and a series carrying with it an impressive regular stock of cast and crew). Cuarón’s film showed the promise of Harry Potter films becoming films on their own, and hardly just for children, while Yates’s helming of the second half of the series fulfilled this promise.

By the end of it, Harry Potter films weren’t simply generation-spanning, but were arguably no longer kid films at all. Exemplified best perhaps by Severus Snape, between eight films the characters were permitted growth in moral ambiguity and complexity well beyond the good/evil paradigm we come to expect from even the most well-respected of movie-spanning franchises.

The (Possible) Future

With the release of Deathly Hollows Part 1 last November, I wrote about how the Harry Potter films follow the basic model of fantasy franchise filmmaking (boy wonder emerging from prophecy to reality as savior for the good in an inevitable, potentially apocalyptic good/evil conflict a la Star Wars, The Matrix, etc.), but at the same time has revealed itself to be a significantly more complex exercise in that each film (especially the recent “half-films”) is dependent on one’s familiarity with a variety of texts and avenues of knowledge which determine one’s cinematic experience. As somebody who has never read the books (though I will some day), the film series has interested me through being able to witness the films themselves mature along with their central characters.

But I’ve always felt, more so than with many adaptations, that the Harry Potter films were supplements rather than substitutes, that I’m missing out on a vital aspect of the series’ appeal by having only seen the films. While the vast response to the end of the series has been awe and respect to the (admittedly imperfect) decade-long cinematic journey that is more like the feeling finally saying goodbye to the characters of a long-running beloved television series than the final chapter of a film, it’s easy to forget that, as films, the Harry Potter franchise hardly came out of the gate with this level of respectability. As a film series, Harry Potter is a durable, impressive, and unrivaled cinematic achievement, but as a series of individual films, it is inconsistent at best, having not found its footing until somewhere between one-fourth and halfway through. Unlike its initial cinematic rival The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter is hardly a unified work of collaboration between an artist of the page and an artist of the screen.

This is why after eight films, the series to me feels incomplete, not in the sense of failure, but in the idea that, by virtue of its initial lack of a consistent approach to the screen, the Harry Potter films exhibit a variety of ways one could have made any individual Harry Potter film. In the first two as opposed to the rest, we see what a loyal (I’ve been told) adaptation would look like. With the second half of the series, we see how Harry Potter as a consistent and unified cinematic vision would come across film-to-film. And with the last two films, we see a different possibility altogether. In making the shrewd business decision of splitting the last book into two films,Deathly Hollows Part 1 engaged in opportunities not available in the other films, opportunities to take a break from condensing the episodes of the book to actually spending time letting moments breathe, including an extended quiet episode with the three protagonists stuck in the woods and (for me, one of the series’ best and most surprising moments) even letting Harry and Hermoine dance quietly to Nick Cave’s “O Children.” I know full well that I’m in the minority for loving this subdued element of the first Deathly Hollows film, but these moments certainly would not have existed at all had Deathly Hollows been adapted as a single film, and even in dividing them into two still didn’t make room to include many important textual elements of the source material (or so, once again, I’ve been told). Imagine for a moment that the Harry Potter adaptations consisted of fourteen films.

Peter Hall recently made a prediction that the Harry Potter films would one day be remade, and while it’s hard to imagine Warner Bros. walking away from a multi-billion-dollar series easily, between Rowling’s tight reign on the rights to the series and our difficulty as audiences of presently envisioning Potter in a different temporal context, it is certainly not outside the realm of possibility that decades from now this series of books would be re-adapted to screen, with whatever storytelling opportunities are available in cinema’s future. While Harry Potter has “ended,” and satisfactorily, I agree with Hall’s sentiment in that it hardly feels like the end in terms of its possibilities. The uneven evolution of the film series as titles rolled out is, in all seriousness, its virtue, not only in achieving those things it does right, but also in showing the many possibilities in bringing Potter to screen, not just in terms of taking a second shot at adaptations that could include and exclude different textual material which would make important elements, like Dobby’s death, just as resonant for film audiences as they are for devoted readers, but also in the potential of different cinematic approaches altogether, as exemplified by the franchise’s existing variety of “visions.” Sometimes both accomplishment and the feeling of incompletion bring opportunities

JUNKFOOD CINEMA 8

Junkfood Cinema: The Replacements

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; lords of the gridiron…or at least the waffle iron. Strap on your helmet and conceal any benefits you received from agents during college because you have just been drafted to the NFL; the Nefarious Film Lovers…League. Ok, so it’s the NFLL, shut up!

Every week we tackle a bad movie to the roaring delight of over eight people. And we don’t just tackle the movie, we tackle it like we’re Ray Lewis with a playoff game on the line and the ref’s just been stricken with blindness. But then, just before the internet starts throwing penalty flags at us, we enter free agency, join up with the film, and use our unabashed love for it to help this underdog win a championship of warped film appreciation.

Finally, after months of heated debate that ultimately muddied the issue and pushed us closer to the edge of complete anarchy…the NFL lockout is over. We can finally stop troubling ourselves with petty nuisances like defaulting on our national debts and get back to what really matters: overpaid sweaty guys knocking the snot out of each other. In honor of this jubilant occasion, I decided to run an all-out blitz on a film from  2000 whose premise eerily mirrors recent events.

This week’s play: The Replacements

What Makes It Bad?

It stars Keanu Reeves. The fact that this sentence is a statement of fact and not a wild flight of drug-addled fancy demonstrates our general failure as a human race. But to his credit, his performance in The Replacementsis strikingly wooden. It’s not entirely his fault. There was a great deal asked of him in this film. Not only was he forced to walk and talk like a human person, but they made him throw a football, woo a cheerleader, and participate in line-dancing usually reserved for only mildly drunk wedding reception attendees. That’s a lot for one six-foot doorknob to handle. But at least someone was nice enough to bring a fog machine and a giant “glamor shots” fan to his first practice so he could run onto the field like the football hero he is…even though he looks like he would be utterly befuddled by an electric football game.

Keanu is surrounded by a miscreant group of football castoffs played by a miscreant group of castoff actors. They are hired as replacement players when the actual players, and the cheerleaders, go on strike just four games before the end of the season. How the players going on strike in any way would inspire the cheerleaders to picket as well is beyond my reasoning, and since the film refuses to let us in on how the league managed to allow a strike to occur before the end of a season, the logistics are left up to us to postulate. The point is that fans are subsequently stuck rooting for Ted “Theodore” Logan, the director of Iron Man, and Orlando Jones; the latter should have been wearing 05 as his number seeing as it corresponds with the expiration date on his career.

This group of scab players is coached by none other than Gene Hackman. Hackman is a great actor who can play anything, but he is a lousy football coach. He seems to confuse any form of general speaking with giving a pep talk. For example, prior to their first game he asserts to his players , “don’t let anyone tell you what you’re doing here doesn’t matter…because you’re getting paid” YEAH! LET’S GO! MONEY DEFINES PASSION! That’s the sort of logic that lead to the necessity for these replacement players in the first place, coach. Also, his approach to play-calling borders on the decision-making capacity of a severely concussed individual. Let’s prove we’re not to be trifled with by coming out of half-time and brawling with the defensive players and getting backed up 45 yards in penalties so we have to take a snap in our own endzone. You know what else would have proven you were serious? SCORING A GODDAMN TOUCHDOWN WHILE IN GOOD FIELD POSITION!

Hey, but at least there’s the head cheerleader to serve as the love interest. By that I mean she serves as proof that Keanu is interested in love as a concept but has absolutely no idea what it is or how it works. They have no chemistry whatsoever and watching them fall in love is like watching two drunken frat boys stumble closer and closer to a clearly marked drainage ditch, knowing they have every opportunity to avoid it, before they eventually topple into it. Her ability to hire strippers to distract opposing players is decidedly stronger than her judge of character. At one point she says to Keanu, “you’re the first player I’ve seen who cares more about his teammates than he does himself” and “that was a great thing you did last night.” Yeah, that thing he did was punch a guy who punched him which started a bar fight…how does that translate into caring about others more than himself?!

To try and confuse us into believing we’re merely watching bad football players instead of bad actors, John Madden has a rather sizable role in The Replacements. But Madden is not in this movie to give it any shred of pro sports street cred. Instead, in true Madden fashion, he narrates each and every one of the events of each game as elementarily as possible. The goal here, as it apparently is every Sunday on Fox, is to ensure that even blind people who hail from subterranean cultures on distant planets–where hockey is the only sport in existence–can understand football.

To top it all off, The Replacements features terrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrible music; deserving of every seemingly superfluous ‘r.’ The music fails on two fronts. The recognizable songs are absolutely cringe-inducing and it’s painfully obvious that “music supervisor” on this film was synonymous with “guy who has a copy of Jock Jams ’98.” Not to be out-done, the score of the film seems entirely ignorant of the action on screen. Case in point, the moment wherein the music rises to a crescendo and reaches it during an insert shot of a cheerleader touching her ass instead of, say, the big hit that ended the incredibly important play.

One last minor gripe I have with the film is that it’s major third act conflict makes not one damn lick of sense. Shane is forced to sit out the last game because Washington’s regular quarterback Martel crosses the picket line. It is established that the strike is about to end so this will be the last game for the replacements. So Martel then proceeds to lazily run the wrong plays and even throw the ball to the sidelines every now and again. Wait…what? Why did he bother to cross the picket line just to come in and intentionally play like shit? There is no mention made of a pending trade deal or gambling scenario so why be the one guy from the original Sentinels to cross a picket line early just to come in and blow a shot at another title?! Even if you subscribe to the “he’s just a douche” mentality, even a douche doesn’t work against his own success. Put it back on the shelf, I don’t buy it. It’s a plot device so convenient that you actually get a free Slurpee with every viewing.

Why I Love It!

I love football. There I said it. We’ve been flirting for awhile, empty promises of coupling were exchanged, but I am finally ready to admit that I am smitten with the game of football. Despite all the flaws on display in The Replacements, and continue to believe me when I say they are numerous, it is still a football movie by God and will therefore command my attention any time it is on TV. So yes, there are vomit jokes and nonsensical choreographed dance scenes, and Orlando Jones doing the opposite of comedy, but passes are still completed, players are still leveled by defenders, and touchdowns are still scored. I can’t help myself, it’s an affliction. I cannot divulge how many times I would have watched this film should the lockout have impeded the start of the NFL season…because football wouldn’t respect me in the morning.

The Replacements has a weird Dirty Dozen meets Police Academy feel to it that I wholeheartedly love. It’s all about the assembly of the rag-tag group of loose cannons to do the job. The owner of the Washington Sentinels is like that pesky “lady mayor” they keep referencing in Police Academy who lowers the admission standards and therefore the “rejects” start flooding in; something we here at FSR can appreciate. It also features a lot of the same casually racist humor that seemed at least more forgivable in Police Academy. If this film had been made in the mid 80s with a better cast, it would have been phenomenal. I can just see Michael Winslow in the Orlando Jones role; creating the sound of a whistle with his mouth to confuse defenders. Or Steve Guttenberg as Shane Falco lending credence to the “if Steve Guttenberg is a better actor than you then it’s time to quit” theory. And just try running the ball against Bubba “Hightower” Smith, I know you won’t! Rest in peace big guy, this article is dedicated to you.

Junkfood Pairing: Bundt Cake

Inspired by an Orland Jones joke, and believe me this is a rare occurrence, I decided to make this week’s snack item a linebacker-sized portion of bundt cake. Now, as “bundt” sounds like “bunt” and “bunt” is a baseball term, the aptness of this week’s junkfood is seriously in question. But if you screamed “BUNT” from the stands at a football game for all four quarters, you would be demonstrating exactly as much actual football knowledge as did anyone involved in producing, writing, or performing The Replacements.