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The SATANIC PANIC COLLECTOR PACK consists of…
– a limited edition hardback copy of SATANIC PANIC with an individually numbered Collector's Edition title page plate,
– plus an exclusive SATANIC PANIC T-shirt, courtesy of artist Mike McDonnell,
– plus a paperback copy of the book.
A very limited number of Collector Packs are being issued, and due to the T-shirt being produced strictly to size and style requirements, this offer is valid strictly by Pre-Order FOR ONE WEEK ONLY!
ORDER HERE: https://www.fabpress.com/satanic-panic.html
A second Special Edition Pre-order option, minus the paperback, will be offered the following week. The Collector Pack Pre-Order offer ends on Sunday 22 May at 9pm BST, 4pm EDT, 1pm PDT.
PLEASE NOTE: The Satanic Panic T-shirt will not be sold as a stand alone item. It will only ever be made available as part of the Satanic Panic Pre-order offers.
Pre-Order Terms and Conditions: Payment will be taken immediately upon completion of your order. By pre-ordering this package you agree to pay in advance of publication, on the understanding that it will ship during the week commencing Monday 13 June 2016.
Size: 230mm x 180mm
Binding: Hardcover
Extent: 368 pages
Estimated publication date: 14 June 2016
Market: Social & Cultural History / Popular Culture
Weight: 1200g
Edition: Second Edition
Cover Price: £29.99 (UK) / $49.95 (US)
Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s
"An electrifying descent into '80s-era cultural terror."
~ Mike McPadden, author of Heavy Metal Movies
In the 1980s, it seemed impossible to escape Satan's supposed influence. Everywhere you turned, there were warnings about a widespread evil conspiracy to indoctrinate the vulnerable through the media they consumed. This percolating cultural hysteria, now known as the "Satanic Panic," not only sought to convince us of devils lurking behind the dials of our TVs and radios and the hellfire that awaited on book and video store shelves, it also created its own fascinating cultural legacy of Satan-battling VHS tapes, audio cassettes and literature. Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s offers an in-depth exploration of how a controversial culture war played out during the decade, from the publication of the memoir Michelle Remembers in 1980 to the end of the McMartin "Satanic Ritual Abuse" Trial in 1990.
Satanic Panic features new essays and interviews by 20 writers who address the ways the widespread fear of a Satanic conspiracy was both illuminated and propagated through almost every pop culture pathway in the 1980s, from heavy metal music to Dungeons & Dragons role playing games, Christian comics, direct-to-VHS scare films, pulp paperbacks, Saturday morning cartoons, TV talk shows and even home computers. The book also features case studies on Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth and Long Island "acid king" killer Ricky Kasso. From con artists to pranksters and moralists to martyrs, the book captures the untold story of how the Satanic Panic was fought on the pop culture frontlines and the serious consequences it had for many involved.
"An often hilarious, sometimes terrifying view into the damage that can be caused when belief outweighs reason."
~ Daniel XIII, Famous Monsters of Filmland
The Authors
SATANIC PANIC features essays and interviews by authors and media critics including Adam Parfrey (Apocalypse Culture), Gavin Baddeley (The Gospel of Filth, Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship and Rock n' Roll), Liisa Ladouceur (Encyclopedia Gothica), David Flint (SHEER FILTH!), Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (Rape Revenge Films: A Critical Study), Adrian Mack (The Georgia Straight), Forrest Jackson (Cosmic Suicide: The Tragedy and Transcendence of Heaven's Gate), Alison Nastasi (Flavorwire), Leslie Hatton (Popshifter), David Canfield (Twitch), David Bertrand (Fangoria; Spectacular Optical), Alison Lang (Rue Morgue, Broken Pencil), Kevin L. Ferguson (Eighties People), Wm Conley (Deathwound), Kurt Halfyard (Twitch), Samm Deighan (Satanic Pandemonium), Stacey Rusnak (The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction), Ralph Elawani (C'est complet au royaume des morts), Gil Nault (Liturgie apocryphe), one-man band John Schooley and Joshua Benjamin Graham, alongside co-editors Kier-La Janisse (House of Psychotic Women) and Paul Corupe (Canuxploitation). The book also features comic art by Rick Trembles (Motion Picture Purgatory) and original illustrations by Toronto artist Mike McDonnell.
North America has its share of sensationalist tabloids – from the celebrity-obsessed to the sasquatch-obsessed – but none comes close in shock value to their Mexican counterparts, which give death the cover treatment in blood-red colour. I first heard of Mexican tabloids via Jim Goad's eye-opening article "!MUERTE! Mexican Murder Mags Let It Bleed" in Answer Me! #2 (July 1992) – after which my first film festival CineMuerte and corresponding fanzine were named. "If homicide equals entertainment, the Mexican murder mags are the hardest-working zines in show biz," wrote Goad. "In their brutal, gore-venerating implication that dying brings us all together, they constitute the true alternative press." But behind these unapologetic publications dedicated to death, sex and sports are the photographers, one of whom has his long, storied career examined in THE MAN WHO SAW TOO MUCH.
This award-winning documentary by photography curator Trisha Ziff follows retired Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides, now in his 80s, who spent over 50 years photographing accidents and crime scenes for Mexican tabloids. Through interviews and reproductions of his striking photos, the film conveys the inner life of a singular artist and his knack for capturing the private moments in gruesomely public spectacle.
Despite accolades from interviewees like composer Michael Nyman, director Dan Gilroy (NIGHTCRAWLER) and a number of curators who count themselves as fans, Metinides had no intention of being an artist; even today he clearly looks at his practice as a compulsion rather than a conscious art. But the early influence of Mexican and American cinema combined with his father's gift of a camera at a young age provided an obvious pathway for a kid with lone wolf tendencies. He was only eight years old when he photographed his first corpse, beginning a long career as a death specialist.
In a move that mirrored the beginnings of America's Highway Safety Films Foundation – also notorious for their graphic portrayal of real accident footage – and despite his age and lack of formal training, the police gave the young hobbyist full access to crime scenes and morgues, letting him into taped-off areas to provide much-needed documentation. He would be 12 years old when he was first published in the tabloids, and within a year he had regular paid work.
Over the years Metinides would find himself documenting bus accidents, chemical explosions and homicides. One gallerist interviewed says he feels conflicted describing the photos as beautiful – in particular one magnificent snapshot of a woman hit by a car – but they are. The reason for this comes from Metinides himself, a highly empathic person in comparison to many others in his business who have to shut themselves off completely from the horror of what they see every day on the job. Like the others, he stays tuned to the emergency radio frequency 24/7 and chases accidents, but unlike his counterpart in NIGHTCRAWLER, his job as a photographer is intertwined with humanitarian goals; there are numerous pictures of him on the scene, taken by other photographers, which show him carrying victims to safety.
His sentimentality comes across further in the way he obsessively collects and catalogs not only his own photos but other newspaper photos he didn't take, wishing – for example on 9/11 – that he had been there to take the photos himself. He also collects plastic frogs, ambulances and fire engines, which the film uses as humorous counterpoints to his photographical fixations. But these collections underscore his humanity; the uncertainty of life, reinforced by witnessing so much death – much of it senseless and accidental – is exorcised through the meticulous maintenance of his collected artifacts. Lining them up, cleaning and dusting them, admiring them in a way any collector can relate to.
Metinides also makes a distinction between the Mexico he photographed – largely accidents – compared to gang violence today which is not only more brutal, but more prolific. While the documentary is not specific about all the outlets he may have worked at as a freelancer, it seems he worked primarily for La Prensa, a daily paper which has its share of tragic photographs but is far from the worst out there – VICE's hour-long 2012 documentary Alarma! Documenting Mexico's Most Violent Crimes focuses on a now-defunct weekly tabloid founded in 1963 that thrives on much more graphic imagery, and with decidedly less photographical panache (David Alvarado, the crime photographer VICE follows, makes a brief appearance in THE MAN WHO SAW TOO MUCH). It is not hard to see why Metinides is the one to become the celebrated photographer among those in his profession.
Dan Gilroy, the director of NIGHTCRAWLER, points out that while America likes to hide its dead – ironic for a country built on and obsessed with violence – in Mexico the dead are front and center, a sentiment shared by Jim Goad in his Answer Me! article. "Death is woven into everyday life, an object of worship, a wistful reminder of faded glories," says Goad. "Our neighbors to the south certainly aren't more perverse than us, maybe just a tad more honest."
THE MAN WHO SAW TOO MUCH has its International Premiere at Hot Docs May 3 – 3:30pm (Hart House), May 5 – 9:45pm (TIFF Bell Lightbox) and May 7 – 12:45pm (Hart House). Info and Tickets here: http://boxoffice.hotdocs.ca/WebSales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=50850~edeed7b8-5598-4ac6-994a-ca71bc407bc4&epguid=1982376d-17a7-4bb4-9959-f38bb053d10d&
Further Reading:
MUERTE! Death in Mexican Popular Culture (Feral House) BUY HERE: http://feralhouse.com/muerte/
"!MUERTE! Mexican Murder Mags Let it Bleed" in Answer Me! #2 READ ONLINE HERE: http://www.jimgoad.net/goadabode/issue%202/muerte.html
Alarma! Documenting Mexico's Most Violent Crimes (VICE Documentary, 2012) VIEW ONLINE HERE: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/alarma-mexicos-most-violent-crimes/
The long running nighttime melodrama DALLAS wasn't just a cultural touchstone for Western audiences, who turned up in droves for much of its fourteen-season run. It was, strangely enough, also wildly popular and surprisingly influential during Romania's dark communist years, when the country was under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu. At this time, only three shows were permitted to air; two were state-run, and the other was the highly stylized and over the top DALLAS. Ceaușescu and his government believed that DALLAS' revelry in excess exposed the evils of capitalism, but instead it captured the hearts and minds of the country. It certainly had an effect on Romanian born filmmaker Livia Ungur who is drawn to the way DALLAS influenced, and sometimes paralleled, life in Romania.
Co-written and directed with Unger's American born husband Sherng –Lee Huang, HOTEL DALLAS is an extremely quirky docudrama. Following some traditional beats with the typical talking head style of documentary presentation, the movie also gracefully interweaves children recreating scenes from DALLAS (Bobby Ewing's "death" and "rebirth" play heavily into the film), as well as fictitious mind-melting (backwards) time traveling segments featuring Patrick Duffy, who may be reprising his role as Bobby Ewing, although he's referred to as Mr. Here. With much of Duffy's story shot from his POV, he is heard mostly in voice overs as he follows Ungur (playing a younger version of herself) to what is referred to as the Endless Column (it is really a sculptural ensemble created by Constantin Brancusi to honor the Romanian heroes of World War I, and which also bizarrely evokes images of DALLAS' grand Ewing Oil building as it projects towards the heavens). It is at this column that Mr. Here can finally be reunited with his wife and resume life as it was.
But life for Bobby/Mr. Here can never return to normal because although the character continued on with his reel life after the notorious dream season of the series, DALLAS was never the same. This may also be said for Romania, which is still working through their own death and rebirth as they move towards a more Westernized way of living (for better or worse, which may be the lingering question posed by the filmmakers).
Sparked by the strange and haunting Hotel Dallas, which was built in the nineties after the fall of communism by ruthless businessman Ilie Alexandru (nicknamed the J.R. Ewing of Romania!), the filmmakers have created an odd, experimental movie that exists in a sort of fever-dream state, which is perhaps an overarching metaphor for the above referenced dream season of DALLAS, and its parallel to the "awakening" of Romania. The film is at once engrossing and aloof, offering no answers, but also not asking complete questions either. It is a sparkling oddity, and one that benefits greatly from Duffy's mostly off-screen but looming presence, floating like a ghost of what once was and will (and perhaps should) never be again. A strange, trippy ride, HOTEL DALLAS is mystical and unique, and worth a look.
HOTEL DALLAS plays at Hot Docs on Friday May 6th at 8:45pm (TIFF Bell Lightbox). Tickets HERE.
Hotel Dallas – Trailer from Ungur & Huang on Vimeo.]]>
FEAR ITSELF is a feature-length essay film commissioned for the BBC's iPlayer from 25-year old filmmaker and Guardian film columnist Charlie Lyne, which first ran in October 2015 and makes its North American debut at Toronto's Hot Docs this weekend. The flipside (in topic, if not in tone) to his 2014 essay film BEYOND CLUELESS about high school cinema (with an emphasis on those films that emerged during his own formative years), FEAR ITSELF is a meditation on the way horror films emotionally manipulate us – and how we are complicit in that manipulation. It was part of a prolific year for Lyne; not only did he make headlines back in January for submitting a 10+ hour film of paint drying to the BBFC as a "protest against censorship and mandatory classification,"[i] but last year's Hot Docs hosted the premiere of the film version of Ross Sutherland's acclaimed fringe play STAND BY FOR TAPE BACKUP, which was produced and edited by Lyne, paired with Lyne's short documentary COPYCAT at the festival, and has gone on to raves at Fantastic Fest, Boston Underground and more. Like FEAR ITSELF and BEYOND CLUELESS, Sutherland's film is also about self-exploration through cinema (though fueled by a more deeply personal methodology).
FEAR ITSELF is comprised of dozens of film clips from throughout horror history and its periphery (even films like ENDURING LOVE and POST TENEBRAS LUX are represented here), overlaid with a whispery narration by Scottish actress Amy E. Watson. Watson's somnambulistic delivery contributes to the film's sense of taking place in an arrested or dream-state, and though the narration often ties thematically with the images unfolding onscreen, it's easy to find yourself flitting between them. Punctuating this interplay is a masterful score by Jeremy Warmsley, who does an excellent job of integrating select sounds from the films with his own concoction of anxiety and dread, most effectively utilizing Pearl's lullaby from NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (you can listen to his full soundtrack on Soundcloud HERE: https://soundcloud.com/jeremywarmsley/sets/fear-itself-ost). The result of these elements is a tone not too far off from that of Johan Grimonprez' essay film DOUBLE TAKE – which explored the events surrounding the making of Hitchcock's THE BIRDS, employing both found and manufactured footage as well as Bernard Herrmann's compositions – but FEAR ITSELF never quite reaches the same level of unease that made DOUBLE TAKE work as a standalone horror film in itself, possibly because the footage in Lyne's film is more familiar than unheimlich.
That said, Lyne goes well beyond the usual suspects in selecting his clips – he is clearly the best kind of cinephile (I know this, because he used THE MUTILATOR theme song), who sees horror as inextractable from the larger cinematic landscape – and his editing is smart and perfectly timed. While the pace and interiority of the narration is going to be a deal-breaker for some viewers, what was most off-putting for me was actually a triptych of true crime references that the text attempts to bring in anecdotally. In a section focused on cinematic cannibalism, the 1972 Andes plane crash, the serial killer Fritz Haarmann and cannibal-turned-restaurant critic/actor Issei Sagawa are all mentioned in a manner of "Oh, by the way, I heard this story once…" that comes off as patently insincere. The faux naivete with which he introduces these stories, one after the other, undermines the critical authority on which the rest of the film hangs. The Andes crash became the Disney-produced film ALIVE (and earlier, Rene Cardona Jr.'s SURVIVE!), Haarman was personified onscreen by Fassbinder cohort Kurt Raab in Ulli Lommel's TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES and Issei Sagawa famously appeared in Hisayasu Sato's weird pinku film THE BEDROOM, all of which are represented here in clips. I suppose the anecdotes are meant to reinforce the notion that the film's voice is not his, but that of a woman who has become reclusive and glued to the tube following a tragic accident.
The damaged, fictitious narrator of Lyne's film finds a contrast in Kristy Guevara-Flanagan's WHAT HAPPENED TO HER, which is narrated by actress Danyi Deats, who played the corpse of a character based on real-life murder victim Marcy Conrad in Tim Hunter' RIVER'S EDGE. There is no denying the visual power of the film's catalogue of images of female corpses in varying degrees of undress and decay, again compiled from dozens of cinematic sources, while Deats talks about the somewhat traumatizing experience of playing dead. WHAT HAPPENED TO HER looks at what transpires behind the scenes to create such imagery, and how its violence can be self-perpetuating if the actresses in service to the art do not have their own boundaries respected.
Through the tag team of interview and imagery we are confronted with the manipulation of women's bodies into unnatural poses, both physically and through emotional coercion. The bodies are mangled, dangled and waterlogged – and yet they come off as strangely beautiful despite the horrific implications (Hot Docs' Angie Driscoll astutely refers to the film as "a postmortem pageant"). Our ambiguous response to this imagery recalls Bram Dykstra's seminal book Idols of Perversity, in which he discusses misogynic trends inherent in fin-de-siecle art, including such common images as "the collapsing woman" and "the nymph with the broken back" as well as the cult of invalidism and the fetish of sleeping and dead women (Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais' painting Ophelia is a famous example of this). I don't think that Dykstra, nor filmmaker Guevara-Flanagan are denying that the image of a woman's corpse can have something sublime about it (it certainly can) – only that when these images become ubiquitous, when a woman's body in an unnatural or painful pose is the only thing we can recognize as beautiful, it's a sign of a more insidious societal problem, in which we are all complicit.
And here is where we get back to FEAR ITSELF – filmmakers use images they know we will respond to in a certain way. Lyne's narrator even refers to the film as something aware – when she says "I just wanted to the film to recognize how I felt," she posits the film itself as the antagonist, like a mad scientist manipulating her with its experiments. If indeed we "get the art we deserve," then Lyne's film is right in its assertion that the imagery we see – the dark, disturbing and dreadful – is just an extension of our own collectively damaged psyche. It's up to us to decide if that's where we want to live.
FEAR ITSELF plays at Hot Docs Sunday May 1 – 10:00pm (TIFF Bell Lightbox), Tuesday may 3 – 3:45pm (TIFF Bell Lightbox) and Wednesday May 4 – 9:45pm (Bloor Hot Docs Cinema) Tickets HERE.
WHAT HAPPENED TO HER plays at Hot Docs in the "Command + Control" shorts program, Sunday May 1 – 10:00pm (Scotiabank) and saturday May 7 – 9:00pm (TIFF Bell Lightbox). Tickets HERE.
[i] "Paint Drying" was ultimately a crowd-funded prank that drew little attention to the practices of the BBFC. It's true that the BBFC – like all rating boards – charges a fee per minute to view and rate films. In Canada, Australia and many other countries, we also have mandatory ratings and a similar fee structure. However this is a fee that distributors pay once they have acquired a film – for any venues dealing directly with independent filmmakers, it is easy to get a ratings waiver. Aside from this, the BBFC reviews their classifications and re-rates films periodically based on changing public mores and does extensive surveying and public talks about their process (which is more than Canada does). I've been told by a BBFC classification officer that these days a film with smoking in it is more likely to be age-restricted in the UK than one with nudity. Where the BBFC's fee practices have recently proven obstructive is actually with regard to DVD extras.
Our SATANIC PANIC limited edition sold out quick, but now you can get a downloadable PDF version in our online store, fully illustrated just like the print book.
Get it for only $12.95 CAD HERE: http://www.spectacularoptical.ca/store/product/satanic-panic-pop-cultural-paranoia-in-the-1980s-pdf-version/]]>
Paul Corupe of Canuxploitation.com and Managing Editor of Spectacular Optical print editions made this great compilation of Satanic Panic-era Christian VHS tapes to coincide with our SATANIC PANIC book. We've shown parts of it at our book launch events over the last six months (Satanic Toast! Satanic Smurfs!), and now it's free online for all to see and share!]]>
Two days ago I had the honour of sitting in an upscale Berlin cafe with Wojtek Janio, whose company Fixafilm had just completed the restoration on Andrzej Zulawski's sci-fi epic ON THE SILVER GLOBE, famously halted in mid-shoot by the Polish authorities and leading to his (second) self-imposed exile to France where he enjoyed the support of the French industry. Wojtek had a laptop perched on the table as the waitress tried to maneuver around it with her armful of plates and coffees, and the surreal imagery of ON THE SILVER GLOBE began. It was jaw-dropping – while existing home video versions struggled to convey the scale of Zulawski's vision using substandard source materials, the restoration brought the film to life from the original negative. Zulawski himself purportedly said it was like a whole new film.
Later that night I found myself near Moritzplatz U-Bahn station, and since it was only a short jaunt to 87 Sebastianstrasse, I made my way over to the gothic apartment building where Anna tended to her monster in Zulawski's POSSESSION. As usual when I'm in Berlin or know people who are, I bugged everyone to visit the film's locations. A lunch meeting planned for Stiege – the Oranienstrasse resto where Mark kills Heinrich in the bathroom (its exterior, anyway – the interior was shot elsewhere) – got relocated to the festival's market hub at Martin Gropius-Bau just as I opened facebook and saw a post from my colleague Alex Heller-Nicholas stating that Zulawski was dead.
I knew he was ill, but on the eve of Lincoln Center's debut of three new restorations of his early works – THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT, DIABEL and ON THE SILVER GLOBE – all overseen by scholar and AZ biographer Daniel Bird (who had cancelled his trip to Berlin to tend to some last minute tweaks on the DCP of SILVER GLOBE), and the announcement that Kino-Lorber had picked up rights to Zulawski's newest film COSMOS, it still came as a shock. It seems unfair that his renaissance should have to carry on without him.
I met Zulawski once, when the Fantasia Festival gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award and I was invited to a small dinner thanks to the Frontieres Market director Lindsay Peters, to whom I will be forever grateful for the opportunity – even though I found myself too shy to say more than a few words to this director whose film POSSESSION had such an impact on me that it graced the cover of one of my books. I dreaded the thought of him actually reading anything I wrote about his films, which can't help but be facile oversimplifications of his dense allegories. I always hoped to meet him again on his own turf, and this time to have the confidence to invite a real conversation. I never knew him, and now I never will, but he'll always be one of the special ones whose films I can say actually changed my life.
I hope that whoever lives on the first floor at 87 Sebastianstrasse notices a stream of sad-looking strangers outside their window over the next few days. One of them will be me.
One of the most common misconceptions about horror fans is that they can't possibly know anything about anything else – especially other film genres. Nowhere is this infuriating generalization more defiantly and intelligently disproven than in Lee Gambin's mammoth 800-page tome on musicals of the 1970s, WE CAN BE WHO WE ARE.
From the lysergic mania of Zappa's 200 MOTELS to Jacques Demy's DONKEY SKIN – in which a young girl wears a magical donkey skin to escape having to marry her own father – to Philippe Mora's long-unreleased gangster homage TROUBLE IN MOLOPOLIS and the last great gritty 70s musical, FAME (technically released in 1980), Gambin's book benefits from his many years as a genre film journalist for Fangoria, Shock Til You Drop and others, as he was able to conduct dozens of interviews with the directors, actors, choreographers and songwriters who united sound and vision in a decadent decade – including Norman Jewison (FIDDLER ON THE ROOF; JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR), Julie Dawn Cole (Veruca Salt, WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY), Joel Grey (Master of Ceremonies, CABARET), John Carpenter (ELVIS) and many more.
Gambin heads up the Australian exhibition collective Cinemaniacs, based in Melbourne, which mounts curated seasons of classic and genre cinema as well as a number of pop-up events throughout the year. He's also knee-deep into writing no less than three film books – one, nearing completion, on Joe Dante's THE HOWLING and others on CARRIE and the history of evil children in film and television. He's a tireless film champion who loves everything from mayhem to melodrama and rarely misses a chance to slip a reference to Paul Newman's THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS into any conversation, no matter how ostensibly disconnected to the topic at hand. Because to a curatorial mind, these connections are obvious, and it's one of the things that makes Gambin so refreshing as a programmer and critic. Below, Gambin talks to Spectacular Optical about his history with the musical genre and the many innovations, thematic obsessions and sexual politics of the musical in the post-60s counterculture era.
The book is available HERE from BearManor Media for $37.95 US.
Your intro is really dense in musical history – were you already well-versed in the musicals predating the period your book focuses on or did you have to go back in time and do a lot of research just to be able to analyze the context for these films?
I already had a huge understanding and insight into musicals prior to the seventies. For me, film history is something that has always been a passion, so therefore it was easy to weave that lengthy intro together. What I intended to do there was let the reader know in a nutshell what was happening before the seventies as far as cinematic musicals went – and to make sure that they understood taht various themes that existed in shows such as SHOWBOAT and WEST SIDE STORY would pop up again in musicals of the decade in question (being the seventies). To know about seventies movie musicals means I should also know about musicals of previous decades – what I do stress however is that all musicals are different. It is incredibly frustrating to hear people (the unenlightened) say that "all musicals are the same" and something I lunge at and correct. Because they're most certainly not. It is a diverse genre, much like the horror genre, and that's what my introduction sets out to clearly state.
It's interesting that you include concert films, which are documentaries, as opposed to strictly narrative musicals – a concert film is traditionally seen as having a very different energy. What fueled your decision to integrate them?
Good question! The core reason I added them is because I felt that most of them were structured in a semi-linear narrative formation. If you look at something like WOODSTOCK, there is definitely a well-thought out plan in the way the film moves from vox pop to musical number to documenting an event (i.e. the rain or the concerns about crowd control) and then back to a musical number. So it has a rhythm similar to a traditional integrated book musical. Also, if you look at the drama that unfolds in something such as COMPANY: CAST RECORDING it is hard not to get emotionally involved as you would in say SOUTH PACIFIC – I feel that just because presence, character, music, interaction, the spectator etc are not being told in a traditional storytelling manner, it doesn't mean that they are not as valid in regards to inclusion. Also, these were incredibly important in the climate of the culture of the time – the decade where HELLO, DOLLY! and DOCTOR DOLITTLE were failing was also when ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS generated a new kind of musical film experience – so to omit that would be foolish.
I love that you see certain kinds of films as being on the same playing field. As much as I'm a longtime fan of Peanuts films, I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about YOU'RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN as through it's a real movie – and yet you make a valid comparison of the film to Stephen Sondheim's musical play COMPANY. You also compare THE PIED PIPER to folk-horror like BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW, which even with the wealth of folk-horror studies, is a connection I haven't seen made elsewhere. I also love that you compare Kris Kringle in SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN to Kris Kristofferson in ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE! To me this is one of the things that makes you really unique as a film writer.
Thank you! That's lovely of you to say. Essentially film analysis should be interesting and unique! And in those examples you make there, it was very clear for me and I am completely genuine in this opinion. I feel that the episodic nature of YOU'RE A GOOD MAN CHARLIE BROWN which systematically deals with a boy's alienation, personal worry, frustrations and depressive nature is a perfect match to the lead character in COMPANY, who is a bachelor surrounded by married friends who only want what is "best" for him. These two musicals are so similar in that way and mirror each other in terms of structure – both are told through dizzying vignettes. Yes, COMPANY is very adult themed and dark, but it still resembles the Peanuts show in a more cynical way. THE PIED PIPER is most definitely a folk horror film – did you know that one of the original posters for the film had it compared to two ecological horror movies that came out around the same time – promising to be more frightening than FROGS, BEN and WILLARD combined?!! But back to the issue of it being a folk-horror film, it is! It is as creepy and as moody as BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW or THE WICKER MAN, and has that ingredient of children in jeopardy which is always unnerving to watch. Finally, as far as Kris Kringle in the Rankin/Bass musical and Kris Kristofferson in the Martin Scorsese film, that is all about the changing face of the masculine – that men of the seventies would be strong and earthy but also sensitive and nurturing. They would also prove to be outsiders, rebels, non-conformists and gentle bearded creatives, which is a perfect summary of the aforementioned characters.
You talk about a 70s version of masculinity – in what way do you think the musical was affected by this new kind of masculinity? What are the signposts of this version of masculinity and was it more conducive to musicals or less so?
In this regard, I like to take into consideration men in relation to female protagonists. If you look at Billy Dee Williams in LADY SINGS THE BLUES and Frederic Forrest in THE ROSE, they are very similar. Left-over cowboys in a sense who have to understand their troubled and drug addled female partners who are both artists. Kris Kristofferson in A STAR IS BORN is a musician completely over his success and on the road to self-destruction all the while nurturing Barbra Streisand's rising career while Gary Busey as Buddy Holly strides through the film with his masculinity firmly in place and never questioned. It's amazing to see the defense of machismo securely noted in something SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, but then completely reconstructed in CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC.
How central were gender issues to these films in the 70s? Especially the fluidity of gender?
THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW really does address this in the most entertaining and wildly imaginative manner.
Both HAIR and OH! CALCUTTA! don't just lionize their subjects – they do present problems that exist in 'liberated' communities – in OH! CALCUTTA! through the rape vignette and in HAIR with the criticism of being an intolerant person in real life while taking up causes left and right. But with HAIR, they address the issue and its moral stance is clear – in OH! CALCUTTA!, do you feel the rape scene is contextualized or is it just irresponsible?
A lot of people hate that vignette in OH! CALCUTTA! – and most of the others from the musical. I think it's phenomenal. It is confronting and ugly and nasty and mean spirited, and totally important. Another vignette has a group of people writing in to an editor of a magazine talking about bestiality and other nasties, and in this one they are fully clothed and no sex acts are re-enacted, therefore I think just singing/talking about sex acts can be an easy pill for audiences, but to be confronted by a rape scene (and with the characters dressed as children no less) is something entirely different and harder to swallow. I don't think it's irresponsible at all, I think it's a violent expression born from what is supposedly a liberated perspective and that is important, to ensure that these post-flower children sexually confident intellectuals can be just as repugnant as the rapists in films that surfaced around the same time as OH! CALCUTTA! hit the Broadway stage.
It's interesting that you see so many films addressing Nazism (BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS, CABARET etc). Is this just because those directors came of age during WWII or is there some other cultural comparison going on?
I think it most certainly is a cultural comparison. The Nazis come to represent the death of expression and libertine values in CABARET and the "age of not believing" in BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS. The seventies was such an incredible period in that the youth culture was such a palpable influence on cinema – change permeates FIDDLER ON THE ROOF and that is completely a reflection of what was going on in society at the time: young people in the western world would be represented by the Sally Bowles of CABARET and their parents and authority figureheads that were trying to "reign them in" would be the oppressive Nazis that come to dominate the picture by the ghoulish end of Bob Fosse's masterpiece.
It seems like the edgier musicals of the decade all started as stage plays. Why do you think that is?
It's very simple – you could do a lot more on stage and get away with a lot more as far as themes, content and taboo breaking. It is always interesting to see how the stage musical will be opened up for film (I particularly love the ones that benefit from cinema such as FIDDLER ON THE ROOF and JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR) but also to see how much of the original anger, cynicism, mischief and so forth comes to fruition on the big screen.
You did a presentation related to the book when it was first released, correct? Can you tell me what the presentation consisted of and do you have any other similar events planned for it?
Yes, at the book launch I did a clip-and-tell lecture featuring a bunch of the films I discuss in the book. It was to give the audience an insight into how each of these movies were completely different and to explore themes that varied in each movie. I went from box office failures such as LOST HORIZON right through to huge successes like GREASE – the latter a movie completely embedded in the pop-culture's mindset and yet unfairly maligned because of this. I would love to do this lecture again, and possibly add more clips to it with more obscure titles such as ROCK 'N' ROLL WOLF and the Italian JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR rip-off WHITE POP JESUS.]]>
The post-Easy Rider period of American filmmaking had its share of sunshiny, no-hassle, bra-burning actresses, but few mastered the combo of cute and carefree as did Joy Bang. While far from a household name, her brief filmography was always interesting, replete with visionaries like Andrew Meyer, Woody Allen, Roger Vadim, Norman Mailer and the husband-wife duo of Jack Bond and Jane Arden. Most of her well-known films didn't give her many lines, or anything more than a decorative role, but Bang had an undeniable onscreen charm marked by a wide smile, a scratchy voice and a sense of the spontaneous. Not to mention a name that was hard to forget.
Bang's professional career began in Boston, where she became the favored star of underground director Andrew Meyer. "She was one of the girls for whom the term 'teenybopper' was coined as a result of her appearance in Andy Meyer's superb An Early Clue to the New Direction," recalls film critic David Ehrenstein. In the mid-60s, Meyer was at the center of a burgeoning avante garde filmmaking scene that included the likes of Bruce Conner, Tom Chomont, Fred Camper and Saul Levine. While all but forgotten now, Meyer's 1966 featurette An Early Clue to the New Direction (its title a facetious reference to a scene in A Hard Day's Night) won first place at the prestigious Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1967. The rambling film starred Joy Bang, with her long blonde tresses and obligatory mid-60s fringe, as one third of a bizarre love triangle that also included painter, poet and Factory star Rene Ricard, and his lover, played by elderly raconteur Prescott Townshend, a sort of Cambridge Quentin Crisp. Townshend was a lifelong gay activist and an early proponent of Boston-area counterculture, which caused him to be embraced by the flower-power set who hung out in Boston Common. The Common bordered the historic neighbourhood of Beacon Hill, where An Early Clue to the New Direction would be shot, and where Joy Bang lived (coincidentally, on Joy Street) with her husband Paul Bang. The film is virtually plotless and shot without live sound, but exists in the leisurely then-present, with the trio drinking tea, riding bikes and featuring the Unidentified Flying Objects performing 'I'm a Woman' in between Townshend's captivating monologues. The film is an early example the kind of low budget, improvisational filmmaking that would come to dominate the East Coast underground scene; like the work coming out of Warhol's Factory at the same time (Chelsea Girls was also made in 1966), the films were a means of determining star power, fuelled more by the exploding charisma of the onscreen talent than either professionalism or the tangible construction of a story.
There was much interchange between New York and Boston at the time, and ties to the Warhol camp were numerous. Aside from their mutual casting of Rene Ricard, Meyer had appeared as an actor in Warhol's 1963-1964 film series Kiss, and Warhol had narrated Meyer's 1966 film Match Girl (an early bio-pic of self-destructive Boston-native Edie Sedgwick). But after Meyer's follow-up to An Early Clue to a New Direction – another short called Flower Child (1966) starring Joy Bang – failed to impress critics as his debut had done (Bang's performance is referred to as "laboured" in James Stoller's village voice review)[i], Bang made the move to New York, where a run-in with The Who may have prompted a brief sojourn overseas.
In 1967, The Who were doing nine dates on a Murray the K show at New York's RKO theatre, billed as Music In The Fifth Dimension. It was their first visit to the US and their blistering, stage-obliterating act causing a well-deserved frenzy in the audience. It was during this slate of shows – which also featured Mitch Ryder, Wilson Pickett and Cream, the latter also making their stateside debut – that Joy Bang met Keith Moon. "Murray the K's wife was on the program," recalled Pete Townshend in a Hit Parader article from later that year, "She appeared about ten times in a fashion spot with teenybopper girl models – Jackie the K and her fabulous fashion show. The most presentable of the models was a girl called 'Joy Bang,' who took a liking to Keith which I think was mutual until she said, 'You must meet my husband, Paul Bang!'"[ii]
It's uncertain what transpired between Bang and Moonie over these nine days and how that impacted her marriage, but somewhat fittingly, Bang's next picture would be Separation, shot in London with the esteemed experimental husband-wife duo of Jack Bond and Jane Arden[iii]. Arden, who would later form the radically feminist Holocaust Theatre Troupe, stars as a recently-separated older woman who takes up with a dashing young American hipster and the two act out immature fantasies. It's a weird blend of the highly emotional states of anxiety that dominate Arden's surreal later film The Other Side of the Underneath, mixed with the zaniness of late 60s British cinema like The Knack…and how to get it (coincidentally, Arden did co-write a TV comedy with Richard Lester in 1955 called Curtains for Harry). Joy Bang plays a woman in a bathhouse, one of the few clothed actresses in a surreal scene where nude women sit still in identical poses and other are massaged and slapped while they talk about their feelings of loneliness. Bang later comments on the emotional torture that others are inflicting on the protagonist, but she is underutilized, just one in a bevy of tantalizing dollybirds.
The following summer she was back in New York, and was among the (possibly masochistic) throng who descended upon the upscale resort town of East Hampton, NY as part of the Norman Mailer circus known as Maidstone (1970). It would be Mailer's fourth film as director and there would be no script, but Mailer's hope was to create a cataclysmic atmosphere in which the boundary between reality and make-believe were violently transgressed.
Mailer plays megalomaniacal movie director Norman T. Kingsley, who is casting a new film in tandem with launching a presidential campaign. Journalists, political advisors, targeted voters, ex-wives and wannabe actors and actresses all spend the next five days in a state of collective madness as the self-important bully sees how far he can push his 'subjects'. Kingsley directs his hanger-ons to strip, scream, fight or make love with strangers while they all vie to impress their tyrannical leader. Joy Bang is one of the dozen or so actresses who heed the cattle call for Kingsley's latest free-love art film. While she has a small role, so does everyone else, with the exception of Mailer, the crotchety beast who unfortunately walks around shirtless in nearly every scene. She necks with Kingsley but gasps in fright when he goes for her underpants, thankfully sparing us a grotesque love scene.
Maidstone was an unmitigated disaster most famous for an unplanned tussle between Mailer and actor Rip Torn, but it further emphasized that Bang knew how to pick her material for the maximum combination of visibility and street cred. Now she just needed a bigger role to show her chops and get her career moving. She would find it with Fred Baker's Events (1970).
Fred Baker was an aspiring New York filmmaker whose side gig was making porno loops for a mobster named Spanish Louey. Convincing said mobster that he could pull off a legit film for equal profits, he borrowed $25K, at risk to his actual life and limbs, to make Events, a "totally improvised dramatic street feature"[iv] in which the actors would play a version of themselves while the self-reflexive script depicts a wannabe directing team turning to porn as a means of financing a documentary about Lenny Bruce.
Like Larry Kent's High (1967), the film blends neorealist-inspired conversational sequences with psychedelic double exposures and the gyrating nightclub scenes of the anarchic free-love milieu. Relationships are tender but also transient, and Joy Bang plays an actress who finds herself at an emotional crossroads when her sexual boundaries are called into question by her filmmaking boyfriend's pornographic endeavors. Joy accuses her boyfriend Ryan of 'selling out', and encourages him to take some time to earn his place in the business instead of rushing into a morally questionable (and then-illegal) diversion. He changes the subject, but when she comes home and finds their roommate Frank taking photos of a naked model, she knows they're planning the shoot with or without her approval. It's an unfashionable time to be a monogamous girlfriend.
Joy walks out during the porno shoot – a kaleidoscopic showstopper with rapid editing, lush swaths of colour, writhing bodies and pulsating sound design – questioning her own ability to "be free". But her real-life stopover in London during Separation becomes a reference point in the inevitable confrontation. "In your mind, Ryan, I got upset because of a little nudity," she says. "But when I was in London I lived with The Stones and people were nude all the time and it didn't bother me." Within the counterculture in full swing, Baker goes against the grain and exposes free love as less 'free' than forced.
When the film first screened at New York's Elgin theatre, Barney Rossett of Grove Press loved it and bought it on the spot for $300,000. "Spanish Louey was extremely happy," said Baker, "so were my arms and legs!" But Baker wasn't the only one to benefit from the film's unexpected success. With the Grove Press/Evergreen press machine behind it, Events got maximum exposure nationwide, with a tie-in movie book and a cover story in The Evergreen Review that saw Joy Bang's face plastered all over US newsstands. The next logical step: the West Coast.
While her first LA jobs were one-time cameos on shows like The Young Lawyers and Mission Impossible, she almost walked right into her own series, with the Don Kirshner-Ernie Pintoff production The Kowboys (1970). After being ousted from The Monkees and getting revenge with the Saturday Morning success of The Archies, Kirshner wanted to try his hand at another live-action musical comedy, this time set in the Wild West. Among the members of the eponymous frontierland singing group were Boomer Castleman and Michael Martin Murphey – aka Boomer Clarke and Travis Lewis of the Lewis and Clarke Expedition – and Joy Bang as the sole female member, Smitty. "All I remember about Joy is that she had a crush on Michael Martin Murphey," recalls Castleman. "She was very professional, as she had more film experience than the rest of us."[v] But Kirshner missed the mark, and the show was never picked up.
She also had a meaty role in the pilot for short-lived TV series The Psychiatrist (1970). The episode was directed by Darryl Duke, whose later masterpiece Payday starred Rip Torn of Maidstone infamy. Pete Duel plays Casey Poe, recently released from serving time on a drug charge. Chased by the cops after scoring (from slimy diminutive character actor Michael C. Gwynne of Payday) he runs into a church where the Staple Singers are playing, has a freakout and calls his drug counsellor (Roy Thinnes). While the film focuses on this violent, pathological, misogynistic character battling his addiction, he joins Thinnes to the small beach community of San Sebastien and discovers that the entire youth scene is overrun with heavy narcotics. Joy Bang plays spacy teenager Kendell, a recreational intraveanous amphetamine user who is wooed by the mysterious stranger, and easily impressed by his fake stories about being pals with Malcolm X and Big Bill Broonzy. When Casey suddenly turns on her, she trips out on LSD and has a screaming fit, but eventually her vulnerability makes Casey have a breakthrough of his own. Sadly Pete Duel committed suicide within the next year, followed shortly thereafter by co-star Barry Brown.
Like actress Mimsy Farmer, whose counterculture status was cemented by a bleach blonde mop-top, Bang's career is marked by two distinct periods separated by a haircut. In 1971, she got the shag haircut first popularized by a 1970 arrest photo of Jane Fonda (shortly after the wrap of Klute), but few wore it as well as Joy Bang, who had already been billed in the press as a "half-Lolita, half-Jane Fonda type"[vi]. The haircut made Bang stand out from the legion of California girls and was enough to earn her the status of in-demand character actress.
The Jane Fonda comparisons also likely caught the attention of director Roger Vadim – then Fonda's husband – who cast Bang as one of the lithesome girls of Oceanfront High School in Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), which was produced and co-written by a post-Star Trek Gene Roddenberry. Vadim's libidinal fantasy murder-comedy gives new meaning to the word bodycount; Rock Hudson is the mustachioed school guidance counsellor who, despite being married to the gorgeous Barbara Leigh (of The Student Nurses), makes it with all the female students, including thumb-sucking cheerleader Joy Bang. He encourages new teacher Miss Smith (Angie Dickinson) to follow suit, urging her to help virginal student Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson, son of western actor Kit Carson) overcome his "impotency problem". When the female students start turning up dead, it appears there's a serial killer on campus, and before long, Bang is found dead in the football field, with a note saying "poor, poor honey!" taped to her rear end and a smile across her face.
By the early 70s, Bang's original director Andrew Meyer had made his way to the west coast too, and was working for Roger Corman doing unlikely exploitation fodder. When given the chance to write and direct a feature called Night of the Cobra Woman (1972), he knew who he wanted for the lead. "It doesn't surprise me that Andy kept returning to Joy, they were close friends had similar ambitions to make important new narratives and to make it in the movies," says Saul Levine. Night of the Cobra Woman is many things, but sadly, an 'important new narrative' is not one of them. The film would mark Joy Bang's final collaboration with Meyer and her first leading feature role since Events, but either she's not up to it or she's not into it, because her performance is a disaster. She plays a student living in Manila doing research for Unicef, developing anti-venom for snake bites which causes her to cross paths with a predatory snake woman (Marlene Clark of Ganja & Hess) who needs to suck the life out of male victims to stay young forever.
Like many American productions shot in the Philippines, the whole movie is an excuse to take advantage of cheap labour (including Filipino staple Vic Diaz in a dual role) and exploit the local fauna: there are cockfights, an eagle fighting a cobra, and a monkey manhandled in a lab. While the chance to work with an old friend and a free trip to the Philippines were likely incentives for the then-budding actress, it was a potentially crippling move. "That was probably the worst movie I did," Bang said in a 2009 interview, "but that has a cult following too, oddly enough."
Luckily she rebounded from the experience easily, and jumped into a triplicate of films that made 1972 probably the most crucial year of her career [vii]. Bill L. Norton was the son of exploitation screenwriter and political activist William Norton, and his first film Cisco Pike (1972) would be a perfect time capsule of the music and drug scene of Venice and West Hollywood. It would also be a first for the film's star Kris Kristofferson who played Cisco, a country singer recently-released from prison whose only wish is to go straight and get his career back on track. But jumpy, crooked cop Gene Hackman has other ideas: he wants Cisco to move a hundred keys of pot in 48 hours or else he's going to frame him and get him sent back to jail. The film takes place over these next few days as Cisco races from one client to the next, while trying to get some studio time in and keep his girlfriend (Karen Black) from thinking he's a total loser.
Joy Bang plays Lynn, groupie and gal-pal to a visibly pregnant Viva who wants to score off Cisco. Piled into the front seat of a car and loaded down with drugs, the trio have a hilarious run-in with a traffic cop before speeding off for a ménage-a-trois at Viva's apartment. The duo pop up again later in the film, with Joy getting busy with Cisco's world-weary (and apparently impotent) musical partner Harry Dean Stanton in the back seat of a car. She later finds him OD'd on smack in the bathroom.
Cisco Pike is one of the most underrated films of the 70s, and would set the character type that Joy Bang would play in her remaining films – the freewheeling adorable simpleton. Her next film saw her back in Beantown for Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972), directed by Paul Williams (not to be confused with either the diminutive pop icon or the Crawdaddy mag founder) and based on the book by Michael and Douglas Crighton (writing collectively as Michael Douglas).
Joy plays Sandy, the bubbly, put-upon girlfriend of cigar-chomping dandy Boston drug dealer John (John Lithgow), who hires Harvard dropout Peter (Robert F. Lyons) as a mule for a cross-country shipment of grass. While in Berkeley, Peter falls for easygoing stoner chick (Barbara Hershey) and arranges for her to courier the next shipment so that they can continue their budding romance. But when she is arrested on arrival and one of the two suitcases goes missing, the group is thrust into a downbeat crime story involving the Cuban mafia and a crooked cop, continuing on the anti-authoritarian suspicions of Cisco Pike.
While these roles seem ornamental to a certain extent, the most dismissive might be her turn as Julie in Woody Allen's Play it Again, Sam (1972). Directed by future Footloose director Herbert Ross from Allen's stage play (a poster for which appears in Cisco Pike), Allen plays Allan Felix, a classic Hollywood-obsessed film reviewer whose wife splits, leaving him to have imaginary conversations with guardian angel Humphrey Bogart. Heeding shadow-Bogey's advice that "There's plenty of dames in the world, all you have to do is whistle," Allan tries to bury his feelings of dejection with some carnal experiments of his own. Of course, he strikes out at every turn (even Viva, who plays an admitted nymphomaniac, spurns him). With his smug pal Tony Roberts as a go-between, he manages to swing a date with Julie (Joy Bang). "Let's go in there and get stoned and watch the freaks!" she says to Allan, convincing him to go into a dive bar where they are promptly set upon by greasy bikers who beat up Allan and abduct Julie. Sadly this is one of few lines she gets in the film, treated as she is like just one in a catalogue of women Allan ceases to impress.
After this tryptich of films, Joy Bang should have been on the rise; instead, her career seemed to wind down. A possibly apocryphal story has her 'blacklisted' as a result of an association with actress Katherine Hepburn. Film critic David Ehrenstein has been a major proponent of this story[vii], claiming that "she was a rising starlet in Hollywood until Katherine Hepburn became terribly superfond of her (and you can feel free to ladle in as much innuendo as you want) and demanded that she be cast as the hippie girl in Travels with My Aunt. When the producers passed on Joy in favor of Cindy Williams, Hepburn walked off the picture during pre-production. She was replaced by Maggie Smith. Cukor was, to put it mildly, very annoyed and it nearly destroyed their friendship."[viii] As to why a stamp of approval from screen icon Katherine Hepburn would be damaging, Ehrenstein says "It appears that when Hepburn ditched Travels with My Aunt because of her, the studios saw her as a 'troublemaker'. But I also believe she was by that time fed up with show business and was glad to leave." [ix]
Still, she had one last iconic role to impart before she split, and that was in Messiah of Evil (1973), the debut of husband/wife duo Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (who also wrote that year's American Graffiti). Released only in oversaturated no-name VHS releases before Code Red gave it the star treatment for DVD in 2009, Messiah of Evil is without doubt one of the most unique efforts of the early 70s American horror boom, largely because it seems to transpose the aesthetics of the European art film onto the commercial ambitions of American exploitation. Marianna Hill plays Arletty, who comes to the small seaside town of Point Dune looking for her missing father, a reclusive painter. While she doesn't find him upon arrival, she does find overshadowing remnants of him – occult-obsessed diary entries, large creepy murals adorning all the walls of the house – and his reputation has attracted a bohemian art collector Thom and his two nymphette travelling companions – the sultry Anitra Ford and the tomboyish Joy Bang as Toni, who is described by Thom as "half girl, half child and half-wit".
The film's art direction by Jack Fisk (a favourite of Brian DePalma and Terrence Malick) is stunning, and it also hosts some of the genre's most memorable murder setpieces, including Anitra Ford's death in a brightly-lit supermarket and Joy Bang's demise in a movie theatre, where she is mauled by the cannibalistic townspeople (who include among them director Bill Norton of Cisco Pike). It's conceivable that director Francesco Barilli was inspired by Messiah of Evil when he made Italian chiller Perfume of the Lady in Black the following year.
Bang's dialogue is limited to teasing banter and complaints ("Yuck! This stuff is shitty-tasting!"), but she has fond memories of directors Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. "I don't remember how I came to be in the film, but Gloria and Willard were the reason I said OK," she recalled in an interview for the DVD release. "I liked them as a directing team. But honestly the rest is a haze – and that's not a reflection on the moviemaking, but a reflection on how far gone to La-La-Land I was at the time. That movie was one of the last jobs I had before I went back East to try to pull myself together."
She was back in New York by the time the film premiered in 1973, her last known role before retirement being a rape victim on an episode of the Joseph Wambaugh-created show Police Story. While Tony Fletcher's Keith Moon biography Dear Boy places Bang in London during the shoot of Ken Russell's Tommy in 1974 (she was invited with Moonie to weekend with Oliver Reed at the boozing screen titan's country estate, where they managed to shock even Reed with the home movies they made on Keith's newly acquired video camera)[x], this is the last known record of her before she purportedly went back to school to study nursing under her maiden name of Joy Wener.
It's worth mentioning that her departure from the business coincided with the death of Prescott Townshend, her co-star from her first film An Early Clue to the New Direction, which was screened at his memorial – marking the close of a circle and a new direction for a kinetic star with a smile that could melt a million hearts.
[i] village voice, Sept. 14, 1967.
[ii] "The Who in New York" by Keith Altham, Hit Parader September 1967
[iii] Jane Arden committed suicide in 1982 and her cinematic, print and stage legacy are really only being reappraised in recent years (notably since her triple bill of films with Jack Bond came out on DVD and Blu Ray in 2009)
[iv] "Making Movies, Some Notes" – by Fred Baker (http://www.filmsbyfredbaker.com/events2.html)
[v] Boomer Castleman, personal correspondence April 23 2012
[vi] http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/Prescott_townsend.pdf
[vii] This chronology is based on the release dates of her 1972 films, but based on the quick turnaround time of Corman productions, it is entirely possible that Night of the Cobra Woman was shot last and released first.
[vii] Although it is corroborated (or perhaps echoed) here: http://www.notstarring.com/actors/hepburn-katharine
[viii] David Ehrenstein, http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/message/32692
[ix] David Ehrenstein, personal correspondence April 19, 2012
[x] Fletcher, Tony. Dear Boy.
A version of this article first appeared in Shindig #27 – buy the actual magazine and get their groovy layout, including a few nice, high-res pics not included here.
Thanks to Saul Levine, David Ehrenstein, Viva, Dick Blackburn and Boomer Castleman.
Other sources consulted for writing on Andrew Meyer's An Early Clue to the New Direction include Wheeler Winston Dixon's The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema and John Dececco and Vern L. Bullugh's Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context.


text:
It's a tragic situation, but it's where we all find ourselves during this most difficult economic period in recent history. Countless private companies have had to lay off valued employees, and there's no reason we should expect government employees to be unaffected.
As painful as it is in the short term, it also spells opportunity. Those seven hundred people will now energize their interests, talents and creativity in all new ways as they explore their options. Some will even strike out on their own, leveraging the upside of "creative destruction" to bring to the world something entirely new.
As former U.S. ambassador and author Michael Novak states, "the distinctive, defining difference of the capitalist economy is enterprise: the habit of employing human wit to invent new goods and services, and to discover new and better ways to bring them to the broadest possible public."
Sometimes there's no way around a tragic situation such as this. But there is a way through, and I'm confident that through creativity and enterprise those affected will find it.
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Steve McKee
This smart looking guy is our agency's president. When he's not sitting in his not-so-oval office looking official, he's busy writing books and winning awards for them.
Published on March 30th, 2010
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