Russ Meyer's Birthday

 

It was sex/filmmaker Russ Meyer's birthday a few days ago, or maybe yesterday? What a remarkable film artist. I remember going to see a film retrospective on Hollywood Blvd and being transported to an extraordinary world. Only two filmmakers affected me in that sense. The other director was Fassbinder. Both are obsessed geniuses who transform their landscape into a private space that becomes public. For me, there is nothing sexy about Meyer's work. It's about sex without the sexy feeling, which is very odd. Also, since he's the cinematographer and director/writer, one enters a place with its own sense of rhythm and rhyme. Meyer is a unique artist. Exploitation is his soul, and the crisp black and white images of his early films are a wonder in itself. But also in his color films how blue the sky is. Nature, tits, ass, and Russ Meyer.

November 17, 2014

November 17, 2014

Some years back I was approached by the filmmaker Russ Meyer to help him with a script that was written for him by the now-famous architect Rem Koolhaas.  His script is called “Hollywood Tower” and it is about a group of rich Arabs  who buy up the rights to a Hollywood archive, with plans to build a giant computer, which they can choose any dead (or live) star and put them back on the screen.  The second level of the narrative is about the Nixon administration who focuses on getting out-of-work actors, including Lassie, get jobs in the movies - and the last is about Russ Meyer shooting a porn film.   Meyer thought it was too large of a project, especially the first and second segments.  He felt that it should only focus on the part of him making a porn film.  I convinced Russ that he should forget the part with the Nixon administration, and focus on both the first layer of the film and the part of him making porn.  I convinced him that we could use the narrative about movie stars replacing the porn stars in his erotic romp.  He loved that idea.  Of course we didn’t have the rights, and as far as I know there is no giant computer that can use stars who were in specific films and put them into the new Russ project.

Nevertheless he suggested using specific stars, but we can’t (of course) mention their names.  I did research and I came up with two possibilities, or use both in the film: Frank Fay and Peter Cook.   I also wanted to add Rem’s point-of-view as well.  I find architecture sexy, and there is something very seductive about Mr. Koohaas’s approach to his favorite subject matter.  I even began to think that perhaps Prada can provide production money for this film.  I remember reading a quote from him which he stated that “a building has at least two lives - the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward - and they are never the same.” Which I think is the basis for his first part of the Russ Meyer film.   To re-cycle a building as something else, why not also make stars into porn actors?

But really, it is not the actual footage of the stars, or the film itself that is in question, but the subject matter of memory and what is true and false.   Last night I had a dream of my deceased father, where I acknowledge in a sense that he died.  The truth is (my truth mind you) is that I never accepted his death.  I just feel he left and went out to get a newspaper and didn’t come back.   In other words, I’m still waiting by the window to hopefully take a view of him walking back home. It won’t happen of course, and I intellectually know that, but emotionally I don’t accept his death.   So putting a ‘dead’ star in Russ’s film is sort of like denying death.  Architecture is the same.  When I walk around Downtown Los Angeles, and look at old buildings like the Bradbury, Mayan, Brockman, and the Biltmore Hotel, I think I’m seeing death, even though the buildings are in use, to me they’re dead.

Peter Cook, the great British humorist, and Frank Fay, the vaudeville comedian, were both, even when they were alive, sort of death-in-waiting.   One can sense that their life is really an act of an instinct, where eventually it will burn down, and then out.  So I thought it would be interesting to “cast” these two in the Meyer film.  Frank Fay is of interest, because he was married to Barbara Stanwyck, and it has been reported that their lives together were the inspiration for “A Star is Born.   The wife’s career went up, while at the same time the husband’s goes into sharp decline.   The film didn’t happen, because I think the subject matter of the script was too bleak for Russ, but nevertheless it was the only time that I really dealt with the subject of death in my work and life.  Meanwhile, before I go to sleep at night, I still look out the window hoping to get a glance of my father coming back home to me.

March 21, 2014 (Tokyo)

March 21, 2014

I can’t even imagine what it was like to be in a movie theater in 1903 and to see “The Great Train Robbery, ” starring Broncho Billy Anderson.  The film was written, produced, and directed by Edwin S. Porter, and Broncho Billy played at least three roles in this ten minute film.  The film is renowned for its composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting.  Also perhaps the first to use cross cutting, where two scenes are taking place but at the same time.  “Broncho Billy was the first cowboy movie star, and to think that was only 111 years ago!

Cinema has consistently been a big part of my life. Ever since my dad took me to see Roger Vadim’s “And God Created Woman.” I think I was around three years old at the time, and my dad wanted to see this film badly, and it was playing at a small movie house (still there I believe) in Larkspur California.  It was an odd experience for me because me going to the movie turned out to be a huge argument between my dad and the manager at the theater.  He just wanted to refuse me entrance, due that I was a child, but my father insisted that he had every right to take his son (even though at 3) to see this Bardot experience.  After making a fuss, and not compromising his stand, I was let in.  What happened afterwards led me to a life-long love for Brigitte Bardot. In the nutshell, it also led me to Boris Vian, because Vadim was a friend of that genius and social light of Saint-Germain des Prés.

Bardot’s sexuality on the big screen and Broncho Billy aiming his gun towards the audience in “The Great Train Robbery” had the same effect on me.  I was nicely devastated over the experience and to this day it has been a major influence or even fuel for my writings and thoughts.  As a young adult, I became a huge fan of Russ Meyer’s work as well.  To some he’s the ultimate sex film exploration filmmaker, but I have other thoughts about him than his reputation.  What I really admire him for is his ability to take one to another world, and that landscape is Meyer-world.  It has its own logic, rules, and aesthetic.  I think it's similar to something like “Star Wars” or “The Hobbit.” Those types of films make their own world, and one enters that world knowing that they are going to live there.  I feel exactly the same with Meyer, because being in his presence (via his films) I’m transported into a place that makes no sense to me, and that is the sole reason why I love his work so much.

I tend to love artists who transport me to their world, and I have to see everything through their eyes.  The late and great Vivian Stanshall was another artist who made me appreciate the finer eccentricities of the British state of mind.  Perhaps he was insane, but I totally understood the world, regardless of the fact that some of his commentary was totally foreign to me.  But as they say in gangster films, I got the ‘drift’ of it all.