Oh, gis Bolts. It's showtime.
People say, good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booth.
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Cut it off.
Today's my birthday. Nice to be very nice to see y'all.
Listen.
I got a very funny story.
I gotta tell it.
Have you ever been to an army hospital?
When you see it live, there's more effect than a protest.
Thirty I want to sixteen.
I'm a very frank person, George. I'll lay it right on the line. Your script, although it is an excellent one, does not have the ingredients for a commercial success. You see, I must present the project to my investors, and that project must meet certain requirements.
I mean like writhing love Garden.
That's sick.
You've got to wait till she says something.
Can you just answer and you play it by year?
That's our Do you like it here?
Let no blasting?
Please don't kill this hair.
You know you're better than him.
I need him for my bread and butter. If it wasn't for him, I'd still be out on the streets.
Please, please, have mercy.
On his soul.
All right, you must be number thirteen. There's no thirteen?
Who are you? O?
No one?
I don't exist, I don't understand. Could you try?
Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host. Mike White joined me once again as Miss Heather Draine.
Hello. Hello.
Also back in the booth is mister Ben Buckingham. It a We are kicking off a month looking at lost or obscure films with William Sachs's nineteen seventy four film There Is No Thirteen. It is an experimental anti war film that Sacks shot with a blend of absurdist humor, surreal fantasy sequences, and biting commentary on the Vietnam War. It centers on draft named George Thomas as he reflects on his life. The film spirals into a series of bizarre,
disjointed vignettes, almost like channels surfing through his mind. One of the reasons it's not widely noticed because it was effectively suppressed in the US. Sachs has said that it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival and got a strong response, but it was never given a proper theatric release in the States. There's some more about military or government pressure due to its anti war content, though that's
possibly apocryphal. I can just hear our ratings drop whenever I do one of these Modi mays, whenever I say, if you don't at anything ruined, turn off the podcast and come back after you've seen the film. That's not going to be very easy with a lot of these films. So good luck, buddy, you're gonna need it. Hopefully you're a Patreon person and I'm sneaking these films to our Patreon. So, Heather, had you seen There Is No Thirteen before coming on the show to talk about it?
No, because, as you just alluded to, this film is very hard to track down. I was familiar with it, and I was immediately intrigued when I saw it pop up and you had mentioned doing a show on it because i'd read the rialto report little. They did a little article on Geene Jennings's role in it, and I was like, Wow, this film sounds really interesting. I wonder if somebody considered themselves a bit of a deep cut person.
I'm like, this is totally new to me, but it sounded like it was pretty much considered lost in that article. So when you brought it up, I was like, absolutely, I want to dive into this film, and I'm so glad I did. I'm looking forward to hearing what you guys have to say about.
It, and Ben, how about yourself.
I realized recently that I had heard of it in relation to Mark Damon no longer being an actor, that i'd heard it discussed in that context, but no stimulated memories or connections or anything. And when I I was looking through with the films you've had there, and I did a quick google and I was like, ah, lost Experimental Response to Vietnam War plus riz Ortolani. I'm in, I'm in.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember how I got a hold of this film. I know, I'm pretty sure that it is William sax himself who is the source of this, according to a lot of these articles we've read. I even saw I wanted to tell you whether I saw a picture of Alexander Trushinsky with William Sachs, and he was like, oh, yeah, you know, he showed me there is no thirteen. I'm like, of course, of course, Alexander, you always are in those right places at the right time.
I'm like, that's pretty cool. But yeah, I can't remember how I got my hands on this. This was on a list that I found years and years ago of these are all missing films, and I just was very determined to try and track down as many as I possibly could, and yeah, managed to somehow. And then, yeah, I've been wanting to watch it for years and years. I finally used this as an excuse to do so. And I have to say, this movie is nothing like the movie that I had in my head when I
read about the movie. It talks about there's a guy. He's in Vietnam and he has had sex with twelve women over his life, and he's reminiscing about those women and they will never be at number thirteen. So I pictured this is almost like a guy at a VA hospital or a guy like literally in a trench in Vietnam talking to somebody else, and this being a series of vignettes walking through from number one to number twelve, and then right at the end he gets blown up
or something and then the title comes up. There is no thirteen. That's what I was picturing. This what I saw totally different than that. Wow. In fact, I want to ask you guys, do we ever see like number one through nine or we just see like ten, eleven, twelve kind of thing.
Now we only see eleven and twelve. And I have written down a transcription of the conversation with the maybe thirteenth, which does show that she might not be thirteen. There might not be at thirteen. Maybe he is the thirteen that doesn't exist. I don't know, but yes, same exact
same series of thoughts that you had. I had that myself, and I have come to the conclusion that that is all like marketing blurbs, attempting to sell it at the time, because that's the kind of film that they were making it at the time of that kind of like a
little bit sexy, YadA YadA yadak. And then because it's just Spanish and no one has cared, no one's been saxes and being Internet savvy getting on Internet and writing what's there or anything, we're just stuck with what appears to be like a marketing pitch and it doesn't reflect the film at all.
Really no, especially because like if somebody like you be listening to this and you google it and one of the first things pops up a prodes are going to be the way and it's just one sentence or a man reminiscence about at the first twelve women he had sex with. And that's really not with this, is it all? You know the earlier girls? Who knows? But it's not even the point. It's not even really the main threast
of it. Also, what blew my mind, like just as a film started as is seeing names in the credits and I'm like, how in the hell is this so obscure? Because while Mark Damon's not like a huge name like a Redford or anything like that, Like this guy, before he went into producing and being a distributor at all of that, had several film credits to his name that are very respectable. I believe you said Baba's Black Sabbath.
He's opposite Vincent Dryson House in Ussia. He's the staxy, romantic lead. He has been seen by many faces in the mid twentieth century. He is a big deal at that time.
Harvey Lemback, Oh my god.
Oh there you go. I knew you were going to bring up Harvey Lemback.
You know me so well. You know how much I love Harvey lambag My, Oh my god, the smile on my face. When I saw his name in the credit, I was like, hell, yes, I think I literally wrote my notes the mant Harvey Limbeck. So whenever, whenever I shovel off this mortal croyl, people are gonna transcribe these like my chicken scratch and just be like Harvey lempbag.
Somewhere in the Mondo Heather library, you know, just like what is going on here? Why is she so obsessed with Harvey Lembeck? Why is it say Heather plus Eric von Zipper forever?
Now, now, Mike, let's not get it twisted. Let's cut the dick. You know that Timothy Carey is the one that would be hardy, but I would totally hang out with Eric Vonson's.
I'm true thinking.
What I'm thinking is that poor little sugar Cane is mixed up with undesirable Eric Vonziper is going to protect her.
I think I adore she's nifty.
That Skydivond looks like fun. Like to try it, Boss.
Von Zeppa and chickles is better right right way go.
I would be one of his rats or mice or whatever those girls will call it. But Harvey, like, oh my god, Ben, you mentioned riz Orlani and one of my favorite film composers, Like if Orderlani's with those guys, or even if I've never seen the movie, if I find a soundtrack that he's done, I'm like, I have to hear this. I want those And so this is it's like, I literally I have covered and written about films that are literally underground, films that are way easier,
fine and attracted information. Then this one, like this should not be anywhere near the obscure level it is. It's bizarre.
Yeah, And so much of what's written online is just slightly reworded variations on the same three paragraph And then even if you listen to Bill sag as Wove sex talk or interviews or whatever, and he's saying pretty much
those same thing. And I only manage to scrape a couple of little bits of info here and there, and so much of what I figured out is just oh this dot, this dot, this dot that like that was that the Sacks was in Rome working on anglicizing Italian films so they didn't look like they Italian because this market was so flooded. They didn't want them in America. So he was like changing the names and redubbing into it. He'd say, putting in like the sounds of cameras which operating,
so it sounded like the dubbing was real. That's where he met his wife and Mark Damon. Of course Mark Damon was in with AIP and all that with the barber's connections in Italy and America backers and forwards. But then I was like, oh, okay that one of the editors plays primarily more a sound and dialogue editor in Italy. Which one was that? I think it was George was it?
No?
Michael Billingslea sorry who Like I look up, was like, doesn't sound very Italian. No, he's born in Zioux Falls, Idaho, but he died in Rome, Italy and he worked on like Cisplodynamite and Bertolucci's Last Angle in Paris nineteen hundred, Stealing Beauty, Cavani's Night, Porter de Martinos Puma Man Deodato's Raids of Atlantas and Cut and Run Full She's new Gladiators. So I'm like, what who is He's an editor And I was like, okay. So the sound recording was done
in Row that's in the credits of the film. So it's like you've got these weird like six degrees come out of thing of how it all moves around and why then So then that would of course would be why Riz is doing the score, because they did all the audio in Italy. I was like, somebody could have figured that out and put it in the Wikipedia before me and saved me like an hour. I'm going into
letterbox and changing the blot synopsis this week. I've held off until we discuss it so we can get some sort of four dimenal idea or what is actually happening. But I'm definitely changing that fucking blot phenopsis this week because it's just it doesn't. It doesn't doesn't, so it's such an injustice.
Rass Kelly's also in or whoever must forget she If you look at one of the posters the Time posters, her name is on the post's she sent the movie for five minutes, but this was her era where she she was in a few years before Greetings, like to Paul Miss Greetings. So I feel like it would make it interesting. There's a few films I kept thinking like this would pair well with those like that one, and weirdly enough, Robert Downy Senior's Pound. I fel like there's
some sort of tonality. I don't know, they're films, but there's some kind of I don't know, there's like a tone about them that I think would match really well.
Real scrappy, yeah, like this underground kind of thing. I mean, you feel like they were squeezing every single penny for this movie.
And there's also like a theatricality to both of them and the way that surrealism is implemented. It's very very stagy. Course with this one, you have a lot of vaudeville themes with especially with the our our patrons saying our v leveg But so it's like you have like old American culture kind of tropes being played, like the Old West sequence. There's a sequence we realized on it like a film, like he's actually shooting a film, but it's at like a soda counter, which again seems like a
very Americana kind of thing. It seems like a very Americana situation. It's fascinating the Italian influence because this is such a if. This film feels intensely American.
Well, and speaking of de Palma, Ralph Bode, who did the cinematography for this one, he would end up going on to Dressed to Kill, and quite a lot of other things. I mean, he was working very hard until his death in two thousand and one. But like, why is this one so hard to find when the DP at least is doing like Don Juan DeMarco and Bad Girls and Made in America like super mainstream things Uncle Buck,
for God's sakes, you know. But then he was also the DP on stuff like the Accused and Distant Thunder, like real well done Oscar Baby kind of stuff. And yeah, like this was I want to say a second time. And I know that we're watching as kind of a shitty cop be transferred over from like a three quarter you matic tape, and there's some real dropout here and there, But I mean, it does look good what we do get to see.
I was actually surprised by how followed the quality of it was, ignoring tracking stuff and picking up someone's bobole
phone signal a couple of point there was. I did feel like I was missing a lot though, in those details, because it feels like there's a lot happening in the missile scene in the background that's like little clues and things that is like more Americana pop culture kind of stuff and it's just too hard to tell the scene where he in twelve are in bed and the pillows these giant pillows with some image on them that looks like old children's books or westerns or something, and I'm
just like, I Dad feels like it's really important and I just can't make it out. Do not know what it is? On that kind of note though, also like I looking up all these old white men Harvey Lembeck included and just being like, well, how many times is Harvey Lembeck in this film where he is just old white guys with mustachs. I think he is in it four or five times, like different characters quote as much.
He's credited as old George in the credits, which is odd because I'm like, okay, so is he actually the older version of our main character kind of revisiting his past? Is he really the protagonist rather than younger George? And I think there's even another George in the credits, like the youngest George. But I know for sure there's two George's in the credits.
So in the opening scene, the person doing the announcing and telling the joke, I believe that's Harvey Limbeck.
It definitely sounded like him.
I think that Mark Damon is in that chorus as one of the singer's last dances as George. So you have young and older George in the same sequence, and I do think they are the figments of their each their own imaginations. This film is that like existential surreal strangeness that they are like both coexisting and not coexisting together, that needed actually exists was something.
That song that you're talking about is by Paul Serrato, who, Yeah, he has had a huge career, well not huge, but he's had a career as well.
There's more online about him than this film.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, there's a whole thing like, oh yeah, he managed a paperback gallery in Greenwich Village where he met Jackie Curtis and I'm like, okay, yeah, and I went he has an official website. I'm like, okay, great, you know, I mean, so does William Sachs. But yeah, I don't know why Sachs could never get this one out there, because this is all original music for the film.
And usually that's like always the sticking point where it's like, oh no, there was a song in here for thirty seconds, so we can't let you put this out, I'm like, what.
I Supposedly the negative was lost, it was just one, which is probably likely. I did hear an interview with him where because it was released in Italy that he sent an internegative to Italy. So there's a possibility somewhere out there in Italy there is an intnegative that could be found and sourced. But there's just no drive for anybody to find it at this point, which is really
quite bewildering. So I watched it twice, and the first time was I watched it with my partner and she was like that was good, not don't quite know what to make of it, bit fairly abstract, but like a good interesting film. And then I watched it a second time, and by the time I got the end of the second time, I was just like, I feel real bad vibes, like way more than I did the first time. And
then I watched the Opening Secrets again. Immediately after watching the head it was just like, oh, this is a circle of hell. This film's got something. Even like the first time round, I was not quite got something as much as they might return into it and was like, oh, oh wait, this is and that and this and this
and is that. And it was just like, oh man, oh man, this is something like there's so many films out there that have survived and lasted longer, Like I was trying to remember desperately what I thought of it, but it kept reminding me of the Jack Nicholson's directorial
debut Drive. He said, for being this kind of like revolutionary response, like the youth man, this is what's happening in America at this time, experimental ever guard I remember waiting that film and being so bored by it and so annoyed by it, and this I did not have that experience at all. And I went, I watched three watch of trailer for Drive. He's there trying to stimulate some memory of it, and it was like it hard
e gauge just from a trailer. But it's like the difference between and I think part of the reason why this has disappeared is because it is an experiential film,
Like it's not a statement film. There's not a specific ideology or there's not it's it's rattling the cages just by the terrible weirdness and steff everence of experience for people at that time and ongoing of the destruction of that they are experienced just because people in powers it's like this, it's like that, And because there's nothing tangible or like to latch onto, it is harder for people
to get excited about it. But at the same time, it means that sixty years, fifty years later, it still has this hunch because it's not tangled up in whatever little flame is burning in that person's heart at the time when they made the film. It actually feels like
an experience of the world. And that's why I've been watching it the second time, realizing how the end just folds back into the beginning, that it's a circle of hell and there's some great, wonderful joys in there because there are positive memories, but it also just that way it keeps like cutting it all the whole way.
That Zach fucked interconnects everything too, because it's like by the time you get to the ending, which I won't jump ahead to that quite yet because we're still in
the early midiction. I know of the pond, right, I know, but it's like when it hits you, it's like my brain start going back to, oh god, this is all connected, because you know, when the film and it's so bruined the way it does it because at first, like you're like, okay, we definitely get the impression of the sky's of Crispin through Vietnam and he has he'll hallucinate like a like a severed foot and like a meat section of a grocery store and to a wall of bombs, which I
looked up which was a very popular chain of grocery stores in New York that went out that got bought up and absorbed by A and P and then that clothes. So that was sad. I love old business history. But but you're like, okay, he's probably it's PTSD, and then by the time you get to the end, you're like, it's PTSD, all right, but you realize the severity of it.
I do feel like it is a statement film, though, because I definitely feel like it's very it is anti war, and that's and sadly because humanity we can ever learn our lessons and species like, because I do get it's not it doesn't get lost in some dated rhetoric, which
can be a problem with some films. The time, it's almost it's got just a universal universal message and way with that, but it's his whole speech about people in the bubbles and referring to cars as herds and all of this, and it's like, and it's always because people, you know, every day, people just go on in their lives and as long as they're in the bubble and they don't have to, they don't have it in their shores, it's like it doesn't exist. And that's that's sad. That's
applicable I think any period of time. Again, unfortunately, because that's also how bad things really sneak up on people. They don't think. It's like awareness is good just in general. But the way everything is interconnected, I wouldn't say this is like a perfect film. It's a little draggy in parts, particularly the middle section, but there is a power to it. I love I love bed your whole thing of a
circle of hell. That's definitely very present. But but if the way it's done is initially incredibly subtle, it's so easy for anybody doing this kind of message to to just go full tilt boogie and just go over the top with it, and instead he pulls back, and some of it's interlaced with like surrealist imagery, it's interlaced with these weird bits of vaudeville and old showbized kind of razzle dazzle, But in a way, by the time you get to the end, that almost makes it more powerful,
because I think the danger if you show all of your cards at once from the beginning, by the time you get to the powerful ending, your numb You see, there's that that that that chance of being overexposed as a viewer. The way this film does it is really fascinating and it is really powerful because it is it ends up being quite the gut punch.
You know. We mentioned some characters that show up multiple times, and there's also like he goes in towards the beginning to movie company and he's got a script and everything, that guy who runs the movie company. He comes back multiple times. But the one I really noticed was Bonnie Inch, who she seems to show up at least three times. I think she might be in that kind of adultish film towards the beginning where it's she's got a rose on her end.
She's got the rose tattoo, and she's in the Orange Julius Diner, which happens immediately before that scene. She definitely returns in the Western Dina soda joint and she's serving him in the supermarket as well. With eleven I think it was yep, yeah, so there's at least goes four.
Her only other credited role was another William Sachs film, with The Incredible Melting Man, where she played a nurse. And that's it. That was her film career. But yeah, she shows up multiple times in here, and I'm just like, Okay, what the she have to do with this? And then at first I thought I was like, well, is she like Girls one, three through ten or something like what is this?
But she was. She was so much woman. She was all not the first nine or something to find stand.
Just rolled all into one.
Yeah, what's cool, it's her.
The ask Tattoo in the credits a Spider Webb, who was this really renowned like pat who are in New York operating when that was illegal? Like he was like a cool, counterproachful underground figure who also with more classic adult connections here. I was good friends with people like Annie Sprinkle.
I had here. Rosey's credited the Spider Web, who appeared in Albert Jacoma's nineteen eighty eight VHS film titled Tattoo Vampire and appeared in nineteen seventy five's SOS Screw on the Screen, which Ralph Bode was also director of photography on.
Oh My God and I Love Screw on Screen. SOS is a fun if anybody likes countercultural era friends like that film has hardcore in it. It's it's not erotic. I mean it's Screw Magazine made it. Okay, let's just tell you every right there, but it's it is a lot of fun. I started funding online and see if there was like a copy of Tattoo Vampire because I saw that too, Like, I have to see this because I love I love shot on video Horror. It shares a title with a great blue Oyster cult song. I
must see this. So if anybody can get a line on that.
Let us know. This is the hard to find empathization in general that I was. I justified Williams. Sax's first three short films and like not.
I found that interesting because there was an interview with him by I think it's Christopher Olsen where he says this is Sax says, I started making films in the London Film School, which was called the London School of Film Technique at the time. I was there one year and made three short films. The first was Dear Missus Smith, a three minute film about an injured soldier. He is picked up on a stretcher, carried for a short distance, and lowered into a pine box. The soldiers bring the lid.
When the lid is lowered, everything goes black. The entire film was one shot from the POV of the dead soldier that's in this movie. I don't know if he just reused his own film, but that sequence is in this film. Like there's the two soldiers, the one skinny guy and the other guy who seems a little older, and he's got the cigarettes, and he offers the cigarette to the younger guy. Like that whole sequence is in this film.
He has a tendency to cycle back around in interesting ways. I heard and curt An interview where you mentioned that he actually remade Breakfast at like a seventeen minute film, and I he was in San Francisco, and I was just like.
Where you mean.
There's two Breakfast short films that I kind of find.
Breakfast about a US space capsule that lands on another planet. A giant pregnant woman picks it up, cracks it over the frying pan and a double yolked egg balls out and cooks while the star spangled banner plays. This film won a lot of prizes at film festivals.
They must have been circulating it through like the school circulating it, because in an interview I listened to, he said he was already back in America when it was blowing up at festivals in Europe, and he was trying to get back there, and it ended up in Mexico for a bit, and then San Francisco or vice versa, and I don't know. He then managed to get back to Rome. That's when he started working there. Like the stories that this guy has, trying to keep track of
them all is just like nuts. Because the reason he ended up in London was because he was in business school and he hated it. So he got kicked out because he hypnotized somebody and then couldn't dehypnotize that. They were like, it's actually illegal to do that, so we have to punish you. And so he like bailed on that and then joined the Air Force before this, before Vietnam had kicked off, and he joined the Air Force
because I want to go and have adventures. I want to be a writer, and you figured, like, that's the easy way, and eat. The one thing I don't want to do is be a medic because I hate all like the blood and guts and everything, which is particularly ironic given his philographic and the like. But he found out if he did really well in the courses, then you could choose where he went to next, like for
the second year, and so he went to London. And the first thing that happened to him when he got to London was the mortuary scene in this film where he was sent to go and footprint to the Prince of a foot of a pilot who had crashed their plane. And they always did prints of pilot's feet because quite often the only thing that survived was the feet in the boots. And so he was standing and the guy gets there and he's, okay, where's this guy? I've got a footprinted. Oh it's in the sink and it's just
like a sink full of formealdide with a foot in it. He's, oh, okay, can I have two pairs of gloves? And the guy's no, it's cleaner than dinner plate. It's fine. I mean it's in for mal diy it's just like, basically most of that scene that's in the film really happened to him, and he attributes that to being his interest in body and pieces kind of stuff, which does recur a lot in these films and in the recurring kind of thing. Like I'm not a big fan of Incredible Melting Man.
But oh my god, part of me would love to see an edit where you edit in everything of There Is No Thirteen as the internal world of the Melting.
Man, because that's what it feels like, that this person who's being sent off on a mission and comes back disintegrated and is towing through all these chaotic, like interconnected pieces of fantasy and memory and everything, and there was something that he was he did keep coming back to with that, which is fascinating.
His filmography is fascinating because like when I after watched Guests, I was looking up and I'm like, I know, like William Sacks, I'm like, oh my god, it's Van Dies Boulevard, which I long, I do love that movie, but that is do you want to talk about a million miles away like the man that gave us the film that gifted us characters like a choot, because nobody everybody's watched this, they'll get this. Nobody calls to to creep man, but it's fantaised boulevard. It's a lot of fun. That is
bizarre to me. It's almost like if if the only thing you'd seen of Robert Downey Senior was readed lips like it's it's weird, very weird. Somebody like maybe somebody should do like we're getting a lot of like more obscure filmmakers and directors on Tourist getting their due with these sets like on Blue Ray. It'd be guice for something for Sax. We still have him that to sound.
More fid We don't though, I believe that.
Yeah, it was pancreatic cancer. I know, damn it passed, but I was always pancreatic cancer. I was not surprised. That's that shit will take you in a minute.
Well never mind.
Yeah him and Mark Damon, Yeah, I know. I was very surprised because I had been in contact with Sacks several times over the last few years. I wrote the liner notes for Incredible Melting Man, which I also agree is not the greatest film. But I asked him some questions about it, and then he was he was just
being kind of a prick about stuff. Like I was trying to line up an interview with him for survival of the film Freaks, the documentary I helped produce a few years ago, and he was like, no, you're way too political and way too open about your political views. And I was just like, he was like, you post too much on your page and I was like, yeah, but it's my page. I can post whatever the hell I want. He was like no, no, like, don't do
that kind of thing. And I was like what And he was like and plus you, what was it like? You don't have voices from both sides? And I was just like yeah, because I I just eliminate anybody who is a Trump supporter. I'm sorry, but I can't handle people that are trying to, you know, openly put down people who I love, you know, people who I care about. Like if your whole political basis is based on hate,
I can't really support you. I'm sorry. So we got into this whole back and forth about how much he loves to argue, and I was just like, yeah, I'd rather not argue about things. It was that whole almost debate me broke kind of thing, and I was just like, yeah, thanks, mister Sachs, I'm kind of done talking with you. But then I was like, well, maybe i'll ask him if he wants to be back on this episode. And I went to look and I was like, oh, yeah, he's dead. Whoops.
We call it the tall matter of effect in our house, where there are certain people that you think are still alive for whatever reason, and then all of a sudden you'll be like, oh shit, I died a fe years ago. But then there are people that you think are dead, and then you still see something and you're like, oh my god, they're alive, and then you feel terrible.
How did Gary Busey outlive? Wingshauser? How did that happen?
You want to talk about it. I'm still grieving. I love wings Houser.
I only found out yesterday and the first thing I did was like, wait, Gary Busey is still alive? Is he? Heat? My god? How did that happen?
Beersey's got out love as well. He's got to be like the Keith Richards of character actors, Like it's where the Collective of conscience though, where like there are just certain people like that. Hearing that, he was like an argument bro though, because I can't. Oh, I can't deal with that kind of person.
It's just really funny because listening to him talk for about half an hour'll be like, oh, God, this guy's a pritt, and then the other half hour I'm like, oh, man, I completely understand where he's coming from and why he's a prick. And really I think I would have got along with him. Really the next hour there like, ah, he's a prick. Oh, he's definitely had a strange life.
There was a lot of stuff in this was like, well, this sounds and feels familiar of like having been in a lot of places, but it never clicking over into more than this side stuff. And then just the fact that one of the interviews where he was talking about how he liked being a film doctor more, which we haven't mentioned yet for those who don't know. Film doctors are the people that they call in to fix the film and it's gone wrong, the producers are unhappy or whatever.
And he apparently with a very successful and popular and widely used film doctor. And there's a couple of them we know of, most of them being they won't reveal what they were obviously, and he said that he actually preferred being a film doctor because the producers left you alone and he could just get on with the job and do it without people messing about. Because to the producers, the disaster had already happened and he was the trusted
person to fix it. But he was the filmmaker, then the producers would never leave him alone, and that'll always be getting into it and making his life difficult and hard. And he didn't work well with people doing that day that style, and so oh man, like you the amount of therapy that he probably didn't do to deal with
being the person who he should hate. Like he's to get to do the job that he wants to do, he has to be the person who fucked up other people's films, and like he maybe saved a couple of films, sure, but like the psychic kind of that's that'll that'll do bad things to your head, like living for like that of thirty forty years. It's not I don't envy him
at all. And there's so much stuff where it was like taking off here and redone this way and redone that way, like to the point where it's almost like every film is a different example of how you can be screwed over as an acre, whether it's like completely re editing it in the process or judgment aka Hit with a Z, which was just like relabeled and promote as a gang film Postboys in the Hood success because I had a young Cuba Gooding Junior in it, but
is actually like a satire about the legal system and judges, which has a scene where Elliott Gould hypnotizes Karen Black and they can't dehypnotize it because he took that he's fans. But anyways, anyway, I gotta find Hit. When I saw, I'm like, I'm looking at it like nineteen ninety two, Elliott girled, Karen Black, Cuba Goody Junior. What were they?
Oh?
It was actually made in nineteen eighty seven and then only released because YadA, YadA, YadA. You know, he got screwed over so many different ways. And he does seem like he was a genuinely interesting, thoughtful person who really was doing some quite genuinely avant garde stuff, working with techniques and materials and things way ahead of its time, and he just licked out the fart crack of history.
Well, at least we'll always have Galaxina.
I only watched that for the first time. I think the only sex film i'd see I seven seen Venue is Boulevard, the only sax film i'd seen up until Really I'm trying to find it, but in Australia it's not here yet. I was thinking, will melt him? And I've watched recently Galaxina and I watched The Force Beyond? Have You Been The Force Beyond? Aka Secrets of the Gods. So it's his nineteen seventies paranormal documentary about aliens and
Bigfoot and conspiracy stuff. And I was watching and I was like, this is incredible, And it took me until halfway through to realize that it was a satire. He was actually making fun of all the people, and it was like, oh, sorry, I have twenty first century brain and you can't tell the difference anymore. This feels normal. This is the way that will talk normally about this stuff, like a giant like green fond comes off diagonally a couple of screens like big Food Country or something like
what is going on? And it was he was just like the way he slid from talking about UFOs, Bigfoot and everything at the time would have been slightly more like crazy and weird, whereas now it's oh no, he's like, why aren't you talking about Jack the Ripper two? But
it's really fun and ridiculous and silly. And so then I watched after that, so I watched Galaxina, and I was like, Okay, you know, this is not a great film, but I'm I feel like I have your comedic vibe carrying across from that, and was just in the right groove with Galaxina, and I like one of the interviews I heard with me, he was saying it like, one of the characters keep telling these bad jokes, and all these people thought that they were his bad jokes that
he thought was good, and he's I failed in the writing at that time because they were meant to be bad jokes. They weren't meant to be funny, and everybody
thought I was very bad jokes, bad bad jokes. I feel like that is almost his entire filmography was like, no, I was making this thing, but I either got screwed over or screwed it up myself, and I came out either too serious or too stupid, and you like couldn't get that balance, and this felt there is no thirteen I don't think he was looking for the balance there. But whatever his regurgitation blender, whatever that of his is, does work in There is no thirteen like it's it's
not about balance. It's not about balance, because anything like that. It's just like that, the detonation of nostalgia and memories an Americana through genuinely as an avant garde, like advanced guard probing into something more. And that's like coming out of this film. I was like suddenly in Walter Benjamin and Guide Aboard and The Society of the Spectacle because it was like, ah, I am struggling to make sense of all this, but he feels like he's directly responding
to these things. Sorry, how the cat going past? Don't knock over stuff, don't knock over stuff, like very much responded, But there was some of the quotes. I'm like, oh man, I was trying to find my book so I could make more sense of these, to get the original quotes. But like in Guide to Board Society of the Spectacle, he wrote, neither death nor procreation is grasped as a
law of time. Time remains immobile, like an enclosed space, which feels like that that's a better description of the plots and offsis sort of film and then.
A man recounts the thirteen women he's had sex with, which is really not here. I mean, we just get one scene where he's talking with the one girl and she's like, oh, give me your body count basically I don't know, nine, maybe ten, and then she's like, oh, well, maybe I'll be eleven. I'm like, oh, okay, cool. That's Margaret Markov. By the way, Margaret Markov and Jean Jennings look kind of similar to me in this, just because I guess they're both young blondes, but very very different deliveries.
I have to say Geen Jennings is very much more sedate than Margaret Markov. But I really need to see Black Mama, White Mama, because I don't know if I've ever seen that one, and I know i've seen the arena, but she was very, very striking. I was really very taken by Markov when I saw her.
She got that great hair. She was like this, like this main of just like waistlengthd blonde hair, and she has great precedence. There's something very kinetic about her that definitely sets her. It's always easy to cast people that look pretty, but you gotta have something else. You got to be able to bring something else to the screen, and she does. It's so funny though, because her character at first, I was like, is this a red flesh?
I'm like, you first meet somebody and they're like, this is our property, and then it's like how many of you that.
I'm like, oh, dude, get out. She's gonna be a bunny boiler before you know it. But obviously didn't quite go that way, thankfully. With Jean, I almost wondered if she was dubbed over because there's this weird accident Jean Jennings was she was in Florida. She was, and shemost sounds like there's like almost a European accident going on here.
I know that too. It's it's quite but it feels like youthful wankerness, Like I am affecting this kind of personality because it feels so put on in like a way that does feel like she feels real at the same time as she feels like she's.
Acting youthful bankardness.
I know.
The most beautiful.
She has a speech about her parents dying in a firework factory accident.
I'm in orphan.
My parents were killed when the fireworks factory that they worked in. I'm sorry, that's okay. It must have been beautiful.
Did it happen at night?
Yes, And everybody said it was the most beautiful spect it had ever seen. People saw for hundreds of miles.
Super stilted. After there, I was like, what the hell was that delivery?
That was wild? That was wild? Because I'm like this, it was very beautiful, and it's like, what is this what we're quite hlordss a youthful wankardness and you're just getting this slight, weird bitch about I'm an orphan And he's like, I'm so sorry. She's oh, it's okay.
It's just so beautiful.
And like the first time, sorry to bounce back and forth between the two women, but the first time we see Margaret Markov, she's holding this giant inflatable light bulb.
You mean lamp bo? Lamp bo? Doesn't does it lamp up? Again? The bad joke the lamp She's like, do you call the lampop? Just the lamp up? No light stop?
What?
Yeah? And I'm just like, well, what is this that? Yeah, what's the meaning of this giant lamp bulp, you know, like, yeah, that was so strange for me, and that they go to a castle. I'm like, what that's like thirty four minutes in when they finally have this talk about his body count and then her saying they call me eleven.
And then it cuts to like a close up shot of beach the water coming in, and I started having like flashbacks to the Terror and Targets because it's like they had that VHS like old sixties beachy weird sound, and I'm like, wait, is this is this going to start like breaking? Was it already doing like a targets or is that just is this a reference to Rogic? But because I'm just like I don't I don't even know, man, the second time rounds oh, that's that where the massacre happened.
Maybe the stand in Vietnam that looks about as Vietnam as every British representation of Vietnam I've ever seen. Sy there's a big concrete bunker that means it's Asia what we have toughets of grass everywhere on a beach. Then it was like going back, like oh, okay, so this is the first time that we're starting to flip back to what might be the place where he experienced the trauma and violence that has put him where he is.
But it's also coming after, like when you're talking about red flags, they're driving to the castle and there's the four three or four men naked being whipped on the roadside as they're driving there, Like that's well, is that we'll realizing?
Probably lucky unless you've signed up for a fun resorts.
William Sax himself said this isn't a horror film, and I'm like, it's not a horror film. It's melting mad as a horror film. But bad vibes, just bad bad vibes doing through.
I got a little Messiah of Evil from this for some reason. Maybe it was the grocery store scene.
I have that note right here. I'm like, Messiah of evil.
What are they beat? I can't help them? There was it was yeah about the beach, but it was also like the empty world, like that the world felt dead, that everything had moved on, and it was just like the ghosts that hadn't caught up, which is like he feels like he's one of the living dead in parts, not as like a zombie living dead, but just and not not because of his pritical disability, Like he's definitely he'd just been sacrificed, and this is the ghost of
a person who's been sacrificed for a greater meaning that is actually meaningless and not productive to anything positive.
When they had that sequence of the person being caught carried on the stretcher, I was thinking, Oh, I wonder if that's him in that stretcher. And then when they put the pine box lid over it, I was just like, Oh, okay, so whoever we're watching is dead. And then I started to get thoughts of is this a Jacob's Ladder kind of thing? Is he dead? But he doesn't want to admit that he's dead? Is he dead? And this is all just a dream of his? Like is this his reminiscences?
And way that it's all kind of jumbled together because there is this whole theme throughout the entire movie of him wanting to be a filmmaker and you know, showing up and he's like, oh, I've got the script. And then there's the want ad that he sees and that eventually takes him back to the VA Hospital. So I was like, Oh, maybe he's in the VA hospital. This entire time, because that's where we start, that's where we
end up going. There's this whole thing too of him saying like, it's my birthday, and then we have a birthday party and we have all this other stuff, and I'm just like, Okay, it's all of these things coming together all at once. Maybe this is like his last birthday, but yeah, we never really get all of that, and obviously I don't want a clear cut explanation what's the fun in that? But it's just like, Okay, yeah, there's
a lot of things to think about here. And then yeah, like him going to the VA hospital and being given that assignment of making that short film about feet and about footprinting. It's so interesting the way that he mixes like animation and college and all of these things into this little short film shows it to the doctors and just no response. Not that was good, not that was bad. They just all stand up and walk out, And I was like, well, I guess that's your response right there.
But I love how I'd see it opens, because you've can hire to make this medical film about how to put print, how to print a foot, and the open presentation by saying I am finally going to make a medical film that's not boring. That could be part of the reason why they walked out. That could have been a bunch of stuffy doctors going, how dare you insult the fine art of medical? Sin them up?
The doctor that hires him, who's taking the brain out of the dummy, and just his delivery, talking about deliveries. Holy shit, his is fantastic. I love him. Mighty small breed.
Oh, such a big guy face free.
Have you ever seen such a small breed in such a big guy?
No?
How did I?
He was drunk?
Thomas own.
I love him too, my note, this is a man that owns and asked Scott un ironically, there's something very just like just all I don't know. It was like I like to describe him, but just like this great theatrical give Chriswell and Terry Thomas at a baby. I wanted more of him. Maybe not in this field though, like another film.
Apparently is in The Mister Papa's Penguins, my character named Reginald. Really that's that Terry Thomas. I looked him up and he's like like lots of indies and shorts and occasional t movies and not much at all. And then suddenly right at the end these Creer, just before he died, he's in Mister Poppa's Penguins and then he plays the old ant Man. I think it was in the Adventures and Came and then he dies.
Oh okay, the old man when they're trying the time travel experiments.
Okay, I don't know. I haven't I haven't seen it.
Wow, I haven't seen it either.
I've seen it a thousand times. But yeah, yeah, okay.
Wow, So there you go. You can see more of it. But the whole thing with the footprinting thing is fascinating because obviously he's taking it from a real thing that happened to him. But it has so much meaning for the film because if he had he is a boiler alert. We haven't even talked about it yet. But Ampu Tea, he seemingly doesn't have hands or feet, and how do
you identify somebody? Your fingerprints are a form of identity, and he has lost all the ways that somebody wouldn't give him an identity in that clinical kind of way. So it's like he's it's it's almost him like being forced to confront a lack that he has in that regard, so much of the film feels like he's, like I said, you get these little like interjections of stuff that like our lose last memories, which could be the trauma trying to reassert itself in his delusions escapes from that reality
or whatever. But then it also could be like that he's trying to just exist and be and is constantly being brought back to ways that he is not, that he doesn't exist in the society anymore, in this world, that all of these traditional markers have been removed from him as possibilities, like on a much more existential level, which is the old like very albu camou a real like just existential dread and Beckett. There's some Beckett vibes here as well, for just like impossible traps.
Yeah, and you're right, I've totally forgot about that final shot where it's him in the bed with no arms and no legs. And then I'm also like, well, if he got his dick shot off, then there is no thirteen. But like her whole thing, when we meet that mysterious thirteen, she's just like.
You must be number thirteen. There's no thirteen. Who are you? Oh? No one I don't exist. I don't understand. Could you try you?
Mad?
I touch you? No, you mustn't. If you touch me, I'll vanish. I don't exist. I'm nobody.
Why not?
Because my father was killed in the warar before he met my mother.
Well, if you did exist, would you have been number thirteen? Perhaps it doesn't really matter that you don't exist?
Why not?
I can't touch you anyway?
Okay, So it's like your No. Thirteen is because you don't exist, as opposed to our main characters know thirteen because he's never going to have sex with this woman or maybe you have a sex again. I'm just like, okay, that's very very different way of thinking about these things.
That's at thirteen days. I think that her father had been off to war.
So even like the way that like he says why not first, then she says why not? They're like a yin and yang. It was sort of like a two halves of the same circle. So it's like the feminine representation of annihilation in this world and the masculine representation of annihilation, And it's like women don't really play a part of this film, despite what the blurbs say, and the film isn't trying to make a film with not about women. It's not trying to exclude women. It's there.
It's just done in the same sort of it's a way like everything's very abcuse like it's not looking at things that it's talking about them. But then at the same time, like with the ending, do you remember like the beginnings, because when I watched this, I went back and watched it. What shit says when he's talking about what he says Whilight, I was like, says this is a bit fun because he says, I love where is it my notes of a mess? They've got to get
better at notes. Okay, So, first of all, the film opens with a joke about dismemberment. The Harvey Lemnbeck character person whichever one he is at this point, if he's introducing vaudeville show, tells a joke about an Italian pow who needs to get a limb dismembered amputated, and he says, oh, yes, I'm okay with that, but can you put it in with the bombs that you drop on Italy tonight? And they like the shore and then the next day, oh, we have to amputate this lim and same thing can
you putting in with the bombs? And then like the third night they had okay and okay, as long as it can be anything. Nope, we're on to you. We've figured out that you're trying to escape one piece at a time. I was like, oh, oh my god. So the joke is not only about this memberment. It's about escape, it's about freedom, it's about returning home, even if you're in.
Peace, and then immediately follows that by saying, I know there's one thing you people really like, people that can move.
That's the line, people that can move. There's nothing you like better than watching people move, Like I, oh my, they just set up the whole film for us, and not be happy about it because it's a film about a guy you can't move. He's a sick bastard, it's all. And then it got straight to him in the hospital talking about have you ever been to an army hospital? And it's super grim and it's like you, I've completely
forgot about that as I'm watching the films. It's like what we were saying before about like it's that doesn't like it's not really fore grounding and stuff, but like, oh no, it full grounds it immediately in three scenes of dialogue that eats separate, connected, and then immediately like exits that in such a way that you forget it unless you watch the film and then hit play immediately and you realize it's in this weird loop where the
ending is immediately responding the beginning is immediately responding to an ending of a man who has no limit and can't move. We chokes about dismemberment and how audiences love people who move.
Do you think maybe that's why he calls cars turds that he's just because they represent the movement that he can not have again. And then that crazy the Markov character where she's like, oh yeah, put on your helmet when they're driving the convertible and stuff, and just the freedom of the open road that they have other than him having to hold onto that lamp bulb super tight.
Little thing about the tongue because he makes like a silly face and she's doing that again and she's like, you have a tongue, and that's quite rare.
In these parts are tickling leading to violence as well?
Oh yeah, that scene was strange. And then even when he's in the elevator the very first time, we see him and the elevator doors open up, and there's that gangster looking guy with a machine gun that shoots at him, and then they cut away and then he just walks onto the elevator. We get a couple of elevator scenes, because there's one later on when he's wandering the city again and he's doing that whole thing about the turds and talking about the air conditioners dripping on him and everything.
There's another shot in an elevator with another old man. You know, you talked about those old men with cigars, and they are everywhere.
In this Sometimes I miss the city.
I hate it, but I still miss it. The streets smell like puke. The air is damp and heavy as he's out of the way. The people tea brains encased in physical human forms days are gray, and the air is heavy as it pushes millions of tea brains lower into themselves, ill venture to their overpriced, dilapidated pods. T brain rides home with other p brains and snake likes weltering turds piled one after another, reddish brown, with windows brown and horizontal stink flavor straws under concrete.
There are turds above the flavor straws.
There are turds everywhere, millions of turds piled one after and before another. Red turds, blue turds, green turds, truck turds, convertible turrets, little turds, big turds, but mostly yellow turds which pump out their black poison behind them, which is scooped up and swallowed by the pea brains and those not fortunate enough to have air bubbles.
And something.
It's hitty me like, because when you were talking earlier about just a lot of the troubles that Sax ran into throughout his whole career. Because our character here is a filmmaker, like he was going into filmmaking before he
got called drafted. I'm assuming, and do you think there's almost like a parallel though of just I'll edit filmmakers and directors get caught off at the limb metaphorically because thinking about like how the way that his films reacted to the medical institution, even though it's like really creative, I was like, man, he got super ambitious for this. What is all what is basically just like a trial run film to see if he gets a job. But I also noticed he didn't actually use the severed foot
that he was supposed to use. He did everything but that.
And reuse the the end gag as well. No tad Tooo that one.
I love that, I love. I can't help it. It's my maybe it's my inner like nineteen sixties, like no budgets exploitation self. I love, but with the end on it, it's so stupid. It just always makes me smile. And there's a little baby stepping and pie doing the footprint
and just but it was so creative. I was actually like, you know what, this is smart because it's honestly like this is he's showing you how to footprint without actually being like, here's a literal severed human flo and that's the doctors are going to have to cut off each toe and ten diff it. It's like, God, damn, that was.
His wife, I believe in that Formeldehyde and then she I think it was her with the scissors cutting off the paper toe. And I don't know if the girl in there, I don't think that was his daughter because they I think he met his wife on this film.
Oh wow, Okay. I kind of wonder because usually with these kind of films that you fight out. Okay again, go back to Robert Daddy soon senior, you know, and pounds.
He met his wife and row so they I think they had been married for a little bit dispoint, but I don't know if they would keep not done. I think it was a child that all.
Yeah, it was credited to Randy Geller.
R A. N.
D Ee is a little girl in Georgie's film So and Bonnie Sachs as the girl in Fermaldehyde.
The interesting thing about that film is that when he's meeting with the producers with his script and they're like, no, we just want pits and ass and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the nudity and all this kind of thing. It's sex seal spectacle. And he's trying to make something more meaningful. And then he's tasked with making a films for communicating information and he hands in something that's much more entertaining and feels aimed at kids.
So it's it's a mirror image of the earlier one where he's the one failing to be meaningful in education. Even though it's great and it's fine, it's like it isn't what they ask for, and it's a whole bunch of stuffy doctors like they want the boring medical film. This is why, like when I said, like the complicated figure of sex is he's not dealing with stuff, but yet he's dealing with a lot of things from a
lot more angles than some filmmakers. Like even when he's getting railing against this society of the spectacle and TNA and exploitation and everything, it's I don't know, matter of facts, not quite the right word, but it's there's a practicality to it that it's like, it doesn't feel like someone getting old, but the arts are important at the more,
I don't want to do something else. And then like when he's tasked for doing something else, he does the like nice version of the things he didn't want to do. It's it's interesting, it's it's complicated, it's messy. Like it There's something that.
The like the distributor producer character says that really stuck with me, because when when George tells the times are changing, and the guy says times are changing, but the audience isn't this producer stuck in the times. But given the treatment this film got outside of Italy. It's sadly true and it's fake as thinking about the whole thing. What's
this film like intentionally oppressed too? In America? It's like the main Vietnam War centric film that came out the same year that this one did was Hearts and Mind, which now is very it's very easy to get hold of and Criterion has it out, But it was like that was a very controversial film and like Columbia refused to distribute it and it was basically suppressed. That's a sneaky way things get censored, I find in modern American times it's ever so much like something super obvious with
the government says we've banned it. Instead, it's more nobody's going to distribute it.
It's a free market. It work.
Well. It's like Captain Milkshake from nineteen seventy. That's a virulent anti war film that other than the filmmaker's selling it, you can't get your hands on it, you know. And it was wonderful, this whole thing of this guy coming back from Vietnam and just not being able to handle it, and what was it. The stuff at home is shot in black and white. The stuff in the war is shot in color, because it's like that's the only time he actually felt alive was when he was in the wartime,
and it's like it was nineteen seventy. You know, we're still like Ben you and were asking as far as like when was the war and like, I mean the beginning of the whole conflict. I honestly can't tell you, because there was all that the French involvement then eventually starts to move into the American involvement. But I remember even Kennedy's sending troops over there. So it had been going on for while, over a decade.
I knew that it would have wrapping up around this time, but I wasn't sure exactly when it does seem seventy four was about when it was like really over as much as it could be. Is there were over sorry ran Bo tweets.
Only over when I say it's over. Yeah.
This was one of the first American films to really tackle it and not in a way of being like, oh, something and such was in the war move on. Most of the films were like that, and so it is entirely possible that it was leaned on. I have heard far stupidest stories about what Army Intelligence and the CIA was up to at this time with all of the spare time that they had, that somebody sitting there watching every film that comes out that relates to it, and going,
they didn't even need to watch the whole film. You just watched the first five minutes, and you react to that because they're talking about the Vegan hospitals and you didn't talk You could talk about the war, you don't talk about the Vegeans, not like that. You don't talk about them in pieces. You don't show the hospitals and the suffering. But they didn't be even in the eating now they don't really want to still talk about that
aspect of the aftermath. And so I can imagine like a very easily someone watching just the first five minutes of this film and going, let's lean on some people and make sure this doesn't appear. And even down to the stories with it going to Berlin Film Festival that you know, apocryphary, we are told that the jury love didn't thought it was the best film, but the people running the show were afraid there would be riots because there was such huge anti American sentiment that it very
very familiar to our current time. That the pushback was just so intense that even though this film was obviously not pro like that they were. People were apparently turning the lights on the cinema's protests and were yelling over it and everything like that, just because it was American and about the war. It's really easy to imagine that it just got shuffled off to the side and no one noticed and no one cared because who would and it is it is just a it does seem likely
to maybe given how much they've disappeared. But Hearts and Mind,
this has a connection to Hearts and Mind. Cans Ralph b do the Bode, the cinematographer, was a second unit cameraman on Hearts and Mind, so that there's there's they're very present, like they would have been aware right at the heart of the conversation around all of this, and it's that actually makes it feel more fascinating, like there is only really a couple of bits that confront it head on, but those bits do it head on in a way that was not happening in the seventies and
even now would feel a bit strange, like this, this is hissed off Monty Python.
Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it, especially with the way that it changes so often. I mean just thinking about like the Western scene where it's kind of western, kind of not. I mean it's taking place in a diner to the point where it has like the sliding door. It feels like it was a railroad car at some point, and it's like the whole thing of him having Harvey Lembeck playing music on the jukebox
like as if it were a player piano. And then yeah, he ends up shooting one guy, but then there's the guy at the chessboard, and doesn't he end up just cutting that guy's hand off. So again with the dismemberment stuff, I'm just like, fuck yeah.
Like that Bitty says it, it pulls out the player, chops his hand off and says, sorry, stranger, I thought you were cheating, which is just oh, that's like American collateral damage. Oh sorry, we invaded your country because we thought he might be a Domino, really davage. But I have to say I was like looking at that guy and being like, that guy looked so familiar. He gets his hand cut off, that is that is he's American. So I don't know if it's young Saint or Jan Saint.
I'll say Jan Sat. He is the street preacher in Frank and Hooker.
I am so glad you said that, because there's another head that way. Yes, because Beverly Bonner is credited for playing like a street walker. This is where I wish the print was cleaned up, because you can't really tell it's her, But Beverly Banner, Bond of Courses are beloved sex worker character in basket Cake amazing, I know, like the connections of this film are insane.
And he would also play Santa in Jacob's Ladder.
Oh my god, is there.
Is no third Ain't actually like a weird like a is it like one of the in Stephen King's The doc Tower. It's like one of the beams. It connects the universe.
It's going by the credits that which, by the way, there's so many great tracking shots in this fall beautiful, Like even even with the kind of not the best quality print we had to work with, you can still tell like the level of just carrot artistry. But there's a amazing track shot at the end when we get that just heartbreaking reveal and you realize, see you're in this, You're surround there's all kinds of people that are various
levels of amputee and those are real veterans. This was shot at an actual hospital and it was late because there's like what in the thanks there's like a veterans group of like dismembered veterans, which again would not surprised mes sense like that doesn't make the country look good. If if this is what this is what we did to the young men that we sent off for this, so we'll just put them off to the side, forget them and again the bubble. That's where you get also
is that like eleven and twelve are nurses. It's almost like a Wizard of Oz thing.
The ending is one hundred percent doing the Wizard of World. They're all there, every person who has appeared is back there again, except it's not like the Wizard of Oz because it's like they're not they knew they wasn't like you were there and you were there and you were there because they all nowhere.
It's not unhappy and what sort of it's but but almost in a wonder is we're eleven and twelve just like a fantasy.
Personally, I think like I did see some people being like, oh, it's hard to tell what's Like a few people who have seen it's like, it's hard to tell what's real and not real, and I'm like, that's not the point. It's not. It's it's much more European in the way that it's approaching that way. It's like he's obviously sacked that there much he loves Fellini and all these people, and it is definitely leaning more to that honor. You
don't have to explain things. It's not necessarily even though obviously the word absurdist mention a lot, I know it is actually more surrealist, and it even it just doesn't really matter. You just have to roll with it. And I think it's it's kind of like we mentioned Jacob's Ladder, and I've also seen a couple of people mention Johnny got He's gun and how this film is similar to that. There's a couple of ways that it's really significantly different.
It's because Johnny got his gun, like you, sets you up from the beginning to know what's going on, so you can more like going with this person on a journey, whereas in this film, we're not going with him on a journey, were with him on whatever his quest is, and the structure reminded me a lot of modern video games, the way it's like these separate, little enclosed spaces and entering into them knowing that there's going to be something but not sure what it is, just to not coincidence exactly,
but just fascinating how much it much like it feels more like that kind of structure, which in a video game we don't think about how chaotic and strange and separated all the parts are. You to roll with it, but it actually reminded me more of if there isn't a thirteen, feels like somewhere like halfway between Johnny Got
His Gun and Ambrose. Abuse is an occurrence at our creek bridge, which is Jacob's ladder, but it's like the way that it differs from those is fascinating because it's like in an occurrence that our bridge character is fleeing something, they are trying to escape to something, whereas our hero in this film is so lost, like he's not even he is seemingly somewhat questing for something, but it's so fragmented and deavored and dismembered that he can't even put
that together. And like in looking at thinking about this film and how it deals with violence and spectacle is also really fascinating because that is quite grotesque in parts literally in the mortuary sequence, that the great mortuary and auticition is pulling the brain out and making jokes about the guy's small brain to his large body and the
hands and the feet and the meat. But it feels like a kind of five or six years before this, you have Bonnie and Clyde and the Wild Bunch, which he is universally seen has been, if not a response to Vietnam, at least like a side effect to Vietnam that you end up with his explosion of violence because of what people are experiencing and seeing what the news, etc. But also how the explosion of that kind of violence is also seen as a way of having This is
where I was appearing to the water Benjamin and the guide bored. My brain was just breaking hat that it's this like the collapsing of histories and the returning to transferring the horror of the violence into nostalgia and displacing it into the past as a way to let it go and excuse it and forget it, and then having the film can ultimate scene be a Western quite violent. We have a dismemberment, we have like multiple people dead, but it's all encapsulated in this actual collapsing of history
that it is seemingly like a train card Dino. Very modern, and that way also remind me Eliminade Joe, like it felt very check at time, the pop modern pop culture kind of collisions. I just I found that fascinating. How much of this film is like very society but very much like refusing to be that. Like there's no Catharsis in the Violin, there's no release, there's no here you go.
So I film writer Katherine Russell, she's got a great book on narrative mortality and death and cinema in particularly new wave cinema, and she wrote that most of the violence in recent American film is grounded in a cyclical, repetitive schema of vengeance. And it's that final scene appears to be that like at the cyclical well, someone's coming back for revenge and this and that and all the
sheriff for finishing, but it's all stripped of everything. It's not pretending to have anything that all the other films are like doing it. Just know this is you're just being confronted with this act of violent almost like a slightly more successful version of irreversible, of trying to strip out all the reasons and meanings for why you get to this cathartic act that you're allowed to enjoy as
an audience. Instead, you're just displaced into this little mini prison filled with there fascinating.
Just so you know, the comic strip that is on the pillow behind them, that is from Gasoline Alley, which is a long running comic from the US. I think it was started in nineteen eighteen and I don't know if it's still running today. I think it actually is.
So there was a bunch of stuff on this So I'm just like, we need some old Americans here to explain who these people are. Because you were talking therese one that I looked up, the Orange Julius.
Oh God, Orange Julius.
Yeah, and he's Buddy Clayton, and I managed to, like almost like the shadow of information, figure out that he's an old board Field period. But there's so many. I bet money that all the old dudes old board Field dudes. But the majority of them, the Internet hasn't found a reason to remember them yet. So you just end up, Oh, they were in one documentary or something and related to vaudeville, and it's like, Okay, cool piece of information.
And just so you know, the secret to Orange Julius is egg white powder and milk powder and sweat. That's the secret. Yeah. Yeah, despite the rumors to the contrary. Yeah, and yeah, Heather, you're right about these tracking shots. There are some amazing ones that are going on. I mean, like I was saying, the whole thing with the that short film that's in there, when the guys are walking and they're in Vietnam, then suddenly they're in New York, so the you've got that kind of great use of
the camera. But yeah, those tracking shots, especially down the hallways at the VA hospital. I mean the very first one, the first time we see them back the way, and I love the way he slides into the frame and then starts telling that joke and then yeah, the camera just slowly pushing in on him rolling down the hallway is fantastic.
Oh God. And then that shot when he's with number twelve in bed and they embrace and then it just starts pulling away and it's almost like you're an elabyrinth of lamps and lighting and mirrors that it's really it's disorienting and it's beautiful. And it also feels like, even even in your first watch, do you feel like this is going to lead to something bad? Though we can't going in again to bed your whole feeling about the vibe of this film. It's just there's just just havness.
And again it's something like super obvious. It's really just riveting how everything is balanced.
And at the end of the film, like after we visit George and we get back to the birthday song and then we kind of move away from him, move out ast all those people that we're talking about. Then we again go through the halls of the VA hospital, but this time it's teeming with life, as opposed to the first time, where it's just there's Lembeck, there's the dancers and the piano player and the singer. That's it.
You know, it feels very abandoned all that that montage of all the empty hallways, empty areas, and now during the day it's just filled with all of these people. And I love how when the credits start, because I think we go we go back to an elevator and we stop there and that's when the credits roll, and then you still hear all the chatter and the voices and stuff. You hear all of the noise that's happening at the hospital.
I'm so glad we got to do this and that we got to see it like I would I would love for this film to like get get more eyes on it, even if and it's something I can't implore because I do feel like, and I don't know if you guys have run into this, I do feel like there's like a newer sort of breed a film fan where it's like, if something isn't in this pristine restoration print,
they they're like, oh, I can't watch that. I've literally met people that are like, oh I can't, and I'm just like and I'm just ideally, of course, like in a perfect way to be great. If everything was in this ideal situation. A lot of films aren't. There's still so many films that are just waiting. And in this case, well, probably if there's no negative, there's no negative, this is it. This is It's probably about as good it is going to get.
This is the one place where I've been waiting for AI for that we have good quality. AI trained to look at something like this, and I'm sure maybe we'll never be able to get the pillar boxing get rid of that, but to look at the image and just actually make it, clean it up, get the detail back
in there. So this is the one thing that I want AI Corp. To say these loss all, like the one most of all on Ario Bava's Rabbit Dogs, to go back and fix all those awful VHS lips that pop in every six seconds and make it a very difficult watch Like that is definitely going to happen. That is at least one plus, but there is definitely. I don't haven't run into those people yet, but there's times we'll watch something I actually no, I don't need to see this like this. I can wait until it pops up.
But that's with stuff that I know will one day pop up, and it comes to these This is it guys.
If you're listening to this and you feel like you might be like this, open your mind, open your right because sometimes like it's better is it ideal? Now? But what in life is ideal? Like sometimes you just take take the riches where you can get them, and it's better to get a chance to see something that's great and that opens kind of your film experience than just I don't know and seeing Patch Adams, and.
I hope that nobody that listens to the projection booth is one of these people that's like, oh, if it's not streaming, it doesn't exist for me. It's like, look behind us, you know, look behind the three of us. I'm sure we all have piles of DVDs and Blu rays. You know. It's like, yeah, physical media, you need to have it in your life because go to fucking Netflix. Nothing before what nineteen seventy four is streaming on there?
Like one movie from the seventies, maybe a few, And it's like, for Fox's sakes, guys.
It's like media breth aiuans like just to survive on something that's not there.
To me, streaming is like a it's like a great appetizer, but you don't always need an appetizer for your meal. Like it's great if it's there, but physical media is where it's at because streaming also nothing security. Things disappear all the time, and then you're just kind of left, oh, shoot, I was going to rewatch this movie. It's not there anymore. But if you own it. You don't have to worry about that.
I think if you, if you are any people out there who are interested in this, but maybe do you struggle with those kind of impose limitations on quality watch video drome before this and then immediately mainline this film and just like you are experiencing a VHS broadcast from the inferiority of someone's hell, and it's perfect.
I love that. I also support the projection booth to become a patron.
I do have to say one thing before we wrap it up. There was one other person in the credits who when I saw that was like, what I know? That name Virginia Field, who was the assistant art director would go on to be the art director and production designer on Friday the thirteenth.
Yeah.
I was like, actually that feels that's that's interesting. This that really tactile America Anna like nostalgia but dangerous. It was like, that makes a lot of sense that she would be involved in both. She also worked here on A Strangers Watching Exterminated too, I'm assuming the Harp that William Sachs made, and my own personal nostalgia filmography and Moving Violations. She was the art director on that was Virginia Field has imbued my childhood brain to a high degree with just two films.
Is that the.
Company that Fred Willard has a pardon?
I can't remember Fred Willer, isn't it but that weird skinny guy and he gets the chainsaw and he's got the hockey mask.
Go on.
I was like, they all lose their licenses and so they have to go to a driving school. I think it's it's got like somebody's brother in it. Might be like Doyle Murray.
That sounds like something I saw a lot as a little kid on Keyble. This is you just un likely some.
Memory horror Police Academy Comedies nineteen eighty five, directed by Neil Israel, John Murray, not even not even Brian Jennifer Tilley, Jamesker.
The woman that played the Where's the Beef Girl? The lady was in that, I think too.
Clara Peller, Fred Willard, yep.
Call blast Clara Peller Yeah.
And Wendy Joe Sperber. Yeah. This the cast is amazing.
Oh god, because there's this whole interaction with Wendy Josperber and Fred Willard about oh my god, oh my god, Ben, this is wild I saw this much as a kid, like this dangerous don cheetle.
Oh yeah, that was another Neil Israel pat Proft joint. I talked with those guys for what was that real genius?
I think Sally Kellerman, Hey ga moving violations of rewatch coming up.
All right, we're going to take a break and play a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages. Some people think Move is about movie. Some people think Move is about the system breaking.
Down, the loasi, there's no respect for anything.
Some people think Move is about the communication.
Gap blah blah blah.
Some people think Move.
Is about the battle of the sexiest.
I think you really are going crackers.
You live so nice dream no Jewish brega wig law.
Some people think Move is just an entertaining comedy.
Some people think Move is more than that. Tell me when we start picking up weird laws, I come for you right in short.
Some people think, and some people don't, and some.
People just move. It's pure goove, move right it are That's right. Our look at obscure films continues next week. When we take a peek at Move, get ready to have that soundtrack song stuck in your head. Until then, I want to thank my co hosts Other and Ben, so Ben, what's going on with you, sir?
Not a whole lot at the moment. In between things, I did a bunch of rushes for Apple Side of Vinegar, which is like taking Netflix by storm and stirring up various amounts of dialogue on either side about shitty Australians in the health industry. It looked good for the thousand or so hours have I watched of it, so I'd recommend that it's not a thousand hours long, just the rushes were Otherwise, I'm just on letterboxed as usual. You
can find me. There is dissolve Pet, one word diss l ved pet, and I come say hi and like I'm trying to make sense more and I write on the bear with Me though sometimes I forget about the making scent part and Heather, what's keeping you?
I'll use this chance to mention I have some essay work that has popped up the recent Arrow has released this beautiful edition of the Cell which has many great supplements and mad Thanks to Alexandra Hella Nichols for bringing me up board for that where I get to write about music video a work and how that plays into the film and its director and you can get that
that is currently available now and terror Vision. I have essays on thirty release of Dance or Dive, which is a very fun if you love low budget mid eighties Las Vegas horror, monsters, ballet, modern dance guests please Cocaine, Oh my God, check it out. My essay is on that as well as their at least of the very technicolor gorgeous early eighties Korean horror film Suddenly in the Dark.
So those we're both through terror Vision. For anything else in other sundries, go to my linktree Linktree dot com. Forward slash Mondo Heather.
Thanks again folks for being on the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on. They're all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com. Slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get helps a Projection Booth take over the world.
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