Of Bunnies and Buns—An Easter Tail

The celebration of Easter has long been associated with rabbits: cute, fluffy, cartoonish white bunnies who hop around the globe delivering gaily-colored eggs. Getting into the spirit of the holiday weekend (which also includes the start of Passover), I’ve been thinking about the motion picture world’s treatment of bunny rabbits. There’ve been lots of filmed versions of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit tales (or, I guess, tails), among them the 2018 live-action/CGI hybrid version voiced by such stars as James Corden, Margot Robbie and Daisy Ridley. Also from England, there’s stop-motion genius Nick Park’s full-length Wallace and Gromit adventure, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The British must have a thing for rabbits: Lewis Carroll’s ageless Alice in Wonderland is full of them. Hollywood has churned out well over two dozen adaptations of Carroll’s Alice story for movies and TV. Disney’s classic animated film from 1951 of course features an iconic White Rabbit and March Hare. So does the Tim Burton variation from 2010, and also the famous live-action Paramount production from 1933, featuring such mega-stars as W.C. Fields, and Cary Grant. (Charlie Ruggles portrays the March Hare.) 

Of course I can’t overlook Bugs Bunny, though that “wascally wabbit” of Warner Bros. cartoon fame is anything but cuddly. It’s a curious bit of trivia that Walt Disney first made his mark not with a mouse but with a rabbit. His “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” shorts were an early hit for their distributor, Universal Studios. In 1928, when Disney decided to go out on his own, Oswald had to stay behind. So Walt and master cartoonist Ub Iwerks shortened and rounded Oswald’s ears, added a long skinny tail, and voila! Mickey Mouse was born.

There’s one more Hollywood rabbit I have to mention, one who meets an unfortunate end. That’s the pet bunny who gets boiled by bad-girl Glenn Close in 1987’s Fatal Attraction. If you recall, she turns a one-night-stand with married guy Michael Douglas into an obsession, with the femme becoming increasingly fatale as she tries to come between him and wife Anne Archer. Result: rabbit stew. 

The success of Fatal Attraction at the box office led, of course, to a proliferation of erotic thrillers by other filmmakers. (You could say the film and its imitators bred like rabbits.) My former boss Roger Corman was always quick to capitalize on any new, lucrative trend, and there was the added advantage that erotic thrillers are cheap to make—little stunt work, no special effects, just a whole lot of boobs and buns. That’s why I found myself, as the Concorde-New Horizons story editor, hard at work on a sexy 1990 rip-off called Body Chemistry, in which two university sex researchers indulge in some extra-curricular hanky-panky, much to the detriment of the male’s formerly happy home life. In our film, the femme fatale, Dr. Claire Archer, lives on, soon popping up in Body Chemistry II (1992) as an on-the-air radio psychologist with a yen for messing up other people’s marriages.  By Body Chemistry III (1994), leading lady Lisa Pescia had been replaced by Shari Shattuck, and Andrew Stevens had come aboard both as hunky leading man and as fledgling producer. The director of BCIII was an irrepressible satyr named Jim Wynorski.  Jim and Andrew gave me an associate producer credit, and also a featured spot as a lady seeking sexual advice on a radio call-in show. Yup, that’s a gussied up version of me stretched out beside a roaring fireplace, with a phone to my ear.

 Too bad I wasn’t on set with Andrew and the bodacious Shannon Tweed for Body Chemistry IV.

W is for Jim Wynorski: Thanks for the Mammaries

There’s a wagon-load of Ws in the Roger Corman world.  Think of portly actor Mel Welles (Little Shop of Horrors), rising star-trekker William Shatner (The Intruder), and Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler (pseudonymously shooting Stakeout on Dope Street). In my day, there was Concorde studio chief Jonathan Winfrey, and of course Don “The Dragon” Wilson.

But none of them compares to the one and only Jim Wynorski. Elsewhere during this A to Z Challenge there have been tributes to Jim, explaining how he won Roger Corman’s heart through a trailer selling the “fact” that the movie Screamers (actually a tepid Italian import) would feature a man turned inside out. Instead of going back over that well-trod territory, I’ll concentrate here on my own experiences with Jim, in the era when I was Roger’s story editor. Jim was a writer-director, and also Concorde’s resident bad boy, one who often cast scantily-clad lovelies by thumbing through the pages of his little black book.

Jim Wynorski -- tall, well-stuffed, and shaggy – is a large teddy-bear of a man, with the tastes of a perennial adolescent. He’s still fourteen years old at heart, which explains how he can make soft-core porn, monster movies, and PG-rated kiddie fare with perfect conviction. Take the case of Munchie, not to be confused with 1987’s far more hectic Munchies. Munchie (1992), shot during Corman’s brief detour into family films, is a gentle comedy about a supernatural critter (voiced by Dom DeLuise) who helps a lonely young boy find happiness. Still, Jim being Jim, it is stocked with gorgeous women. Gage Dobson’s single-parent mom is played by the voluptuous Loni Anderson, and the role of his sympathetic teacher went to a former Wynorski squeeze, Monique Gabriel. When it came time to cast the cute youngster who catches Gage’s eye, Jim found someone he considered suitable eye-candy for the prepubescents out there. Her name: Jennifer Love Hewitt. She was innocence personified, but her smile, in those long-ago days, lit up the set.

That was the era when TV actor Andrew Stevens (best known for Dallas and for being the ex-husband of one of Charlie’s Angels, Kate Jackson) was moving into producing and directing. Along the way, he played a number of roles for Roger Corman, both heroic leads and comic parts like that of the pompous suitor in Munchie. I’ll write more about Andrew some other day, but I’ll focus here on his instant connection with Jim Wynorski, with whom he collaborated on several Concorde projects. I’m thinking specifically of Body Chemistry 3: Point of Seduction, directed by Jim and produced (under Roger’s auspices) by Andrew, at the same time that he played the macho but vulnerable victim of Claire Archer’s sexual wiles. Jim and Andrew look absolutely nothing alike. Andrew back then was still leading-man handsome, while Jim reminded me of an overgrown satyr. (Jim occasionally showed up with his hair and beard dyed blond, which certainly added to that impression). Still, their boyish shenanigans in my office were right in sync, and I took to calling them “twins separated at birth.” Ah, those were the days!

Nor did Jim and Roger Corman seem to be birds of a feather. After all, Roger resembles nothing so much as a hip minister or a college professor, one who’d theoretically look down on Jim’s adolescent style. But they share the same aesthetic -- what Jim calls “a big chase and a big chest.” Joe Dante probably said it best: “Jim Wynorski is the side of Roger that he may have inside, but he never lets anybody see.”   

Do Pray for Me, Argentina

Now that the world has its first Latin American pope, I’ve been thinking a lot about Argentina. Not that I’ve ever been there. (I do have some cousins in Buenos Aires, whose long-ago visit to L.A. proved traumatic for everyone in my family. For one thing, they looked down their noses because we didn’t serve steak on a daily basis. Yeah, right.)

As a kid, I associated Latin America with the musical numbers so ubiquitous in old Hollywood movies. You know the ones I mean: full of maracas, conga drums, ruffled sleeves, and ladies wearing fruit baskets on their heads. A tiny but spunky Brazilian entertainer named Carmen Miranda became the queen of such musical kitsch. She and her ilk were deftly parodied by Danny Kaye, who (in the famous “Lobby Number” from Up in Arms) briefly posed as “Carmelita Pepita, the Boleevian Bombshell.” I’ve seen vintage musicals in which such blatantly Anglo chanteuses as Judy Garland and Jane Powell impersonate south-of-the-border señoritas by shaking shoulders, hips, and anything else that moves.

Latin America also shows up in American movies as a place full of crazed dictators, evil kidnappers, and massive political unrest, as reflected in such tough-minded dramas as  Salvador and Costa-Gavras’ Missing. Those of us from the Roger Corman world remember how Roger’s penchant for making overseas production deals led to a whole series of shot-on-location thrillers, usually set in the fictitious South American nation of San Pedro. Roger is not much prone to making jokes, but even he sometimes joined in on our comic laments for this benighted republic, which suffered from every disaster our screenwriters could think up. Revolutions! Earthquakes! Native uprisings! Nuclear holocausts!

At least three Corman sword-and-sorcery flicks were filmed on the cheap in Pope Francis’s native country. Regarding The Warrior and the Sorceress, a continuity goof  cited on IMDB reminds me of the haphazard nature of all such productions: “When Naja first escapes from the castle, her g-string is purple. By the time she is reunited with her father, it's gold.”  Corman crews also shot two Deathstalker films, the second of which was completely rewritten on the set by irrepressible director Jim Wynorski. To Jim it seemed pointless “to make a serious movie with tinfoil swords  and a cardboard village.” That’s why he ripped up the script and opted for outrageous comedy. Jim insisted to me, “This was a great film because I was totally out of control.”  

According to Jim, Roger loved the change in tone, despite the hand-wringing of the local Argentine producer. This producer was a courtly old gentleman named Héctor Olivera. I enjoyed working with Héctor on the screenplay of an erotic thriller, also for Roger, called Play Murder for Me. But he is best known by fans of Argentine film as the director of a brilliant 1983 political satire, Funny Dirty Little War. Yes, Argentina’s movie industry is worthy of respect. The great Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura came to Argentina for one of his intricate, memorable dance films, Tango. The Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, usually won by Europeans, has twice been awarded to Argentine productions: The Official Story (1985) and The Secret in Their Eyes (2009).

But Argentina’s greatest contribution to world cinema is undoubtedly a man who writes wonderfully jazzy film scores. Lalo Schifrin has been responsible for Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, and a host of Clint Eastwood films. Go to his website to hear his most famous score of all. Perhaps it will serve as theme music for the challenges Jorge Mario Bergoglio will face in the years ahead. 

Jim (Sorority House Massacre 2) Wynorski Finds Love

With the holiday season winding down, I’m thinking of one of my favorite elves, Jim Wynorski. Jim, who’s directed dozens of Roger Corman movies since Chopping Mall in 1986, has something of the girth (as well as the beard) of Santa Claus, and no doubt could do a great Ho-ho-ho. But Jim, for all that he’s pushing sixty, remains at heart a fifteen-year-old boy. That means he loves movies that are naughty in an adolescent way. His aesthetic, as he once boiled it down for me, is simple: “Big chase and a big chest . . . If you put those two ingredients in a movie, you’re going to have a good time.” Still, though he’s made films with titles like The Devil Wears Nada, Jim retains a youthful naïveté that helps him grasp a child’s-eye view of the world.

Which led him to make Munchie, a kid-friendly trifle about a magical creature who brightens the life of a lonely young boy. Because I was deeply involved with the film’s screenplay, Jim invited me to show up at the Concorde studio, with my family in tow, to take part in a major sequence. We were to play guests at a wild and crazy party thrown by the irrepressible Munchie (voiced by Dom DeLuise). “Wild and crazy” in this context meant a lot of oddly assorted guests dancing around young Gage’s living room in colorful costumes. My husband took a day off from work, and my children were released from school to participate in this “educational” experience. Having been on movie sets before, I knew there’d be lots of waiting around before we were needed. So I didn’t try very hard (shame on me!) to get the gang to the Concorde lot at the assigned call-time. To my chagrin, Jim was running ahead of schedule, and we were whisked through wardrobe and onto the set before the hair-and-makeup department had a chance to grab hold of us. Jim positioned us in a prominent spot, and filming began.

The sequence took most of the day to shoot. During the lunch break, a crew member flagged me down. I was wearing a rather sexy harem girl outfit, but my hair was short and my face was bare. In a few moments I was tricked out with lipstick, rouge, eye shadow, and a glorious cascade of chestnut locks. If you chance to see Munchie, look for me on the dance floor, just behind the main actors. Magically, from shot to shot I go from short hair to long and from paleface to glamour girl. Fortunately for my reputation as a Hollywood extra, Jim Wynorski has never been obsessed with detail.

What he is obsessed with is eye candy. He filled his cast with voluptuous women (including Loni Ackerman as Gage’s good-hearted but definitely hot mom and Wynorski’s sometimes-squeeze Monique Gabrielle as a classroom teacher). The script also called for a cute little girl to catch Gage’s eye at the party. Jim being Jim, he was determined to come up with a young actress whom a preteen boy would find enticing. He chose an adorable thirteen-year-old with a dazzling smile. Her name was Love, and this was her first film. Today she’s a TV star: Jennifer Love Hewitt.

The following year, Jim starred her in a variation on It Happened One Night, featuring a poor little rich girl and the gruff private detective (Howard Hesseman) assigned to track her down. Little Miss Millions, originally called Home for Christmas, is the most innocent and charming film in the often-lurid Jim Wynorski canon.

Fast, Cheap, and Furious

You can’t copyright a title. So Universal Pictures, which has just released Fast Five, one more entry in its lucrative car-racing franchise, didn’t have to ask Roger Corman for permission when it made The Fast and the Furious in 2001. Roger’s own The Fast and the Furious dates all the way back to 1954. This 73-minute race-car drama—shot in nine days on a $50,000 budget—was the twenty-eight-year-old Corman’s second film as a producer. It also marked Corman’s first opportunity to step behind the camera himself, when for one climactic sequence he served as a second-unit director. He filled in as a stunt driver too, later telling journalist Ed Naha that he had ruined one take by failing to let the hero pass him in a key racing sequence. Said Roger, “I got so excited about driving a real race car that I drove to win the race.”

As Roger’s filmmaking career gained traction, his passion for speed did not abate. Though notoriously frugal in most respects, he sometimes treated himself to sports cars, even (briefly) a Lotus. Cheapie director Jim Wynorski, who started as New World Pictures’ head of advertising, once told me a revealing story about Corman’s car mania. It seems Roger was driving a Los Angeles freeway, with Wynorski as his passenger, when somebody cut them off: “I remember going down the 10 Freeway, with him hitting 80, 90 [miles per hour], trying to beat this guy to the exit who had cut him off. He was living Eat My Dust for real. And I thought, ‘There’s a reason he made all those car movies. He likes cars. He likes fast cars.’” Wynorski wasn’t worried, though, about his own safety: “For some reason, I felt the Roger Corman angels were hovering over that car.”

But the Roger Corman angels have their limits. Former Corman assistant Anna Roth (now the author Anna Hays) remembers her very first day on the job, when Corman ran out of gas in Beverly Hills’ Benedict Canyon and she (then a newcomer to Los Angeles) had to quickly track him down. Remarkably, he had called her at the office because he didn’t know his own home telephone number. Roth finds it disconcerting that “he wasn’t aware of his gas gauge or his home number or even his home address. At the same time, he was very detail-oriented and very precise.” Once, writing with a pencil stub on a tiny scrap of paper, he showed her the formula by which he worked out his video contracts, using pre-sales to guarantee $250,000 in profit before each film was even in the can.

If Roger’s behavior contains contradictions, so does his choice of vehicles. In my day, he mostly drove a large black Mercedes. But you might also see him tooling around town in one of the fleet of cut-rate picture cars on which a Concorde minion had gotten a good deal: a not-fast, not-furious Chevy Caprice Classic.