Stan Berkowitz, Bat Scribe

I first met Stan Berkowitz in the rather grubby offices of the UCLA Daily Bruin. I was a grad student who thought it would be fun to write about movies for my fellow collegians, while continuing to crank out serious literary papers for my profs. And Stan was my oh-so-amiable editor. Decades later we re-connected, when he showed up at one of my book signings. I found out then that—like me—he’d eventually gone Hollywood. In fact, he insisted that, post-college, he was a candidate for the same Roger Corman job that ultimately changed my life. As a graduate of UCLA’s film school Stan doubtless had far better credentials than I did for making B-movies, Corman-style. After all, he was a budding filmmaker, not an English major. Still, I was female, which doubtless helped me get Roger’s nod. Stan instead found work with Russ Meyer, the auteur behind such deathless sexploitation flicks as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!  Meyer, unlike Roger, didn’t want women doing challenging work in his offices or on his sets. He wanted them in front of the cameras, flaunting their “Guns of Navarone” bazooms, leaving his all-male crews in a permanent state of arousal.

 Following his Russ Meyer stint, Stan eventually found his way into television, He started out writing for crime dramas like T.J. Hooker, then eventually discovered his niche in the wonderful world of superheroes, crafting shows like Batman Beyond, The New Batman Adventures, Superman: The Animated Series, and Justice League Unlimited, ending up with two Emmys on his shelf. Now that he’s old enough to be considered an expert in his field, he’s decided to share his wisdom in a charming little volume called Beyond the Bat: Secrets of a Superhero Scribe.

 In thirteen lively essays, Stan bares his insights on how to succeed in Hollywood. He describes working with a closet racist, trying to create a show for Middle Eastern audiences that featured Muslim superheroes, and struggling to incorporate Old Testament stories into an animated series for the Christian market. (That chapter is titled: Written by Stan Berkowitz . . . and God.”) He dishes about what it’s like to butt up against a superstar’s vanity. (William Shatner, here’s looking at you!) In one hilarious chapter, he reveals how to get attention for your student film. This involves a curvaceous unclad lass and a whole lot of donkeys.

 Chapter 3, titled “The Green Group,” struck a chord with me by merging a story from Stan’s early life with a discussion of why some people are attracted to superhero characters. Back in the first grade, when learning to read was at the top of the agenda, Stan’s teacher automatically assigned “the little bespectacled kids” to the Blue Group, on the assumption that they would be fast learners. Stan, though, was among the “big, oafish-looking kids” stuck at the Green table, where they were clearly being identified as slow. Fortunately, he and his buddy Gregory (also a Green Group-er) fought back, via their parents, and eventually got moved up to the smart kids’ table. The episode convinced young Stan to distrust the judgment of those in power, and his anti-authoritarian streak has stayed with him from that day to this. No wonder he has gravitated toward characters like Batman and Superman who are essentially vigilantes, going over the heads of elected officials to clean up crime and save the world on their own terms.

 If you think the world of TV production is glamorous, Stan provides a healthy reality-check. And his book, amusingly illustrated by Dan Riba, is a ball to read.  

 

What’s Faster, Pussycat? (An All-American 4th of July Gorefest)

If I hadn’t worked for Roger Corman for so many years, I probably wouldn’t be a fan of Faster, Pussycat1 Kill! Kill! This is a movie that has the great  Corman virtues: it’s fast-paced, it’s concise, and it packs a wallop. To be clear, this is not a Corman film. It was shot in 1965 by exploitation king Russ Meyer, who also concocted the original story, what there is of it. 

In terms of personal style, Russ Meyer can almost be considered the anti-Corman. Roger in his prime projected the aura of an English professor or a hip minister. Meyer, a combat cameraman during World War II, was a self-proclaimed man among men, who was married three times but seemed most at home hanging out with his old military buddies. Clearly turned on by tough, sexy women with oversized breasts, Meyer in film after film indulged his personal obsessions, once saying, “I don't pretend to be some kind of sensitive artist. Give me a movie where a car crashes into a building and the driver gets stabbed by a bosomy blonde, who gets carried away by a dwarf musician.”

Before he passed away in 2004, Meyer directed 29 films, with titles like Mudhoney, Supervixens, and Wild Gals of the Naked West. In 1970, at a time when camp was flourishing, he was actually hired by Twentieth Century Fox to shoot a relatively big-budget film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, as a follow-up to Fox’s crowd-pleasing Valley of the Dolls. (Roger Ebert, a Russ Meyer devotee, wrote the script.) But Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! remains the closest Meyer has come to making a classic. The story, such as it is, involves three tough, sexy young women (with, natch, oversized breasts) who are out seeking thrills in the California desert. Stumbling upon an innocent young couple, they make short work of the guy and abduct his female companion. Then there’s a crippled old man who has a hidden cache of money as well as a mentally disabled son. What happens thereafter is not pretty, though good triumphs over evil at the very end.

Among the cast, the standout (in more ways than one) is the witchy and bosomy Tura Satana, whose exotic looks and background led her to a career as an exotic dancer (and, it is said, a romance with Elvis Presley). Trained in martial arts, she is frequently given credit for supplying many of the film’s best lines and visuals. Both before and after her death in 2011, Satana inspired homages of many sorts. In the film, her #1 victim, young Linda, is played by the sixteen-year-old Susan Bernard, whose protective mother had the challenge of watching over her on the set. It’s Bernard’s death on June 21 of this year (after a long career in B-movies) that has encouraged me to return to her very lurid debut film.   .

   

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill, shot in black and white on a $45,000 budget, was not successful when it opened, but it quickly became an exploitation classic. Though initially critics (other than Roger Ebert) were scornful, many have come around.  John Waters, in typically over-the-top fashion, has said the film is “beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.”  There are still frequent references to it within pop culture^{, .} On The Simpsons, for instance, an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon is titled Foster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!  It took a reviewer on IMDB to give it the perfect accolade: “the Citizen Kane of trash cinema.”

R is for Roger Corman, and Roger Ebert, and Russ Meyer: An Unholy Trinity

Today’s a special day here in Movieland: my chance to salute three memorable men whose names begin with the letter R. The first is my former boss, Roger Corman, who plucked me from a doctoral program in English literature at UCLA and made a dishonest woman out of me. By which I mean, of course, that at New World Pictures he taught me the fine art of making and distributing exploitation films, saving a buck by any means necessary. For instance, in order to drum up free publicity, he asked me to invent bogus news items involving major Hollywood stars who were supposedly appearing in our cinematic versions of public-domain literary works. That’s why you can find, in a long-ago issue of the Hollywood Reporter, an announcement that Roger Corman has signed Orson Welles to star in New World’s adaptation of Melville’s The Confidence Man.

In the late 1950s, while Roger was coming of age as a filmmaker, another World War II veteran was directing his first films. Russ Meyer, like Roger Corman, made low-budget movies with a high quotient of sex and violence. Especially sex. Meyer began as a photographer, and big-busted women were his specialty. If they talked -- and acted -- tough, he liked them all the better. One of his 1965 movies epitomizes his tastes: it’s called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Before I was hired by Roger Corman, a friend named Stan Berkowitz applied for the same job. It’s no surprise that I beat him out. Roger is impressed by advanced academic degrees like mine, and he prefers that his assistants be female. It’s not simply that he’s looking for young ladies to fetch him coffee. Several generations of women in Hollywood (including Gale Anne Hurd of Terminator fame) can attest he believes women work harder, work cheaper, and are more loyal. That’s why he entrusts them with technical positions as well as office jobs, pioneering their ascent into the ranks of producers and directors.

My friend Stan ended up working on a Russ Meyer film, Supervixens. On the set he saw plenty of women, most of them flaunting the audacious “Guns of Navarone” bazooms that were Meyer's stock in trade. But on Meyer’s production team there was not a female to be found, and the pneumatic starlets were strictly off-limits. Meyer made movies to feed his personal obsessions. He wanted his crews, like himself, in a permanent state of arousal.

Today Corman, at eighty-seven, is still churning out monster movies. Meyer passed away in 2004, at age eighty-two, though his mind had abandoned him a decade earlier. He might have been his own most perceptive critic when, in a 1978 interview, he told a young reporter, “If I wasn't so into tits, I probably could've been a great filmmaker.”

And as for Roger Ebert, whose death we all recently mourned, where does he fit in? We knew Ebert as a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, as well as a man who was courageous in the face of his own mortality. To his credit, Ebert was no snob, and he freely admitted to enjoying Russ Meyer’s tawdry but energetic brand of filmmaking. In 1970, when big studios were desperately trying to be hip, Meyer was actually hired by Twentieth Century-Fox to direct a sequel of sorts to Valley of the Dolls. For Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Meyer concocted a baroque spoof chockfull of drugs, porn, nudity, gender-bending, and a final burst of mayhem reminiscent of the 1969 Manson murders. And yes, Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay. It was not exactly his finest hour.

To celebrate Roger Corman’s 87^th birthday (a few weeks late), I’m hereby announcing a big sale on my Corman Kindle ebook, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, for the bargain price of $2.99. This was the book that just got a rave in last week’s Wall Street Journal, as one of reviewer Carl Rollyson's five favorite Hollywood biographies. The sale price should show up on the Kindle site by April 21, and the last day of the sale will be May 4, so come one, come all! 

Miyazaki and Gorman (Who?) Meet Russ Meyer

My friend Roxanne Lane, once the powerhouse PSA coordinator for Women in Film, is serious about movies and the status of women. That’s why she turned me on to a blog called “Cherchez La Female,” in which entertainment journalist Krystyna Hunt muses about “the power and influence, good or bad, of women in films.” So far Hunt has discussed The Hunger Games, Winter’s Bone, Chicago, and the work of Hayao Miyazaki, whose strong female leads in animated features like Spirited Away strike her as the best possible role-models for young girls. Hunt describes her topic thus: “The roles of women in film have most often been controlled by men. Sometimes the portrayals have been very good (such as those produced by Studio Ghibli), sometimes they have been very bad (such as those directed by Roger Gorman).”

Hey, wait a minute! There’s no question that Studio Ghibli, which is Miyazaki’s home base, has produced wondrous heroines. But Roger Gorman? (The misspelling is Hunt’s, and reminds me of all the ways that Corman writers and directors have amused themselves by sneaking Roger’s name into their cast of characters. On TV’s The Phantom Eye, he himself played a mad scientist pointedly called Dr. Gorman. And I recall an oddball neighbor named Namroc, along with other variations.)

Anyway, though women in Roger Corman movies definitely serve an eye-candy function, I wouldn’t be so quick to see their roles as entirely negative. I’m thinking, for instance, of Angie Dickinson in Big Bad Mama. She’s strong; she’s tough; she’s sexy as all get-out; she takes charge of her own destiny. There are lots of other kick-ass women in Corman flicks too, and even the heroines of his slasher movies (like Slumber Party Massacre) have what it takes to survive, bloody but unbowed. Then there’s the fact that Roger has always made a point of promoting women behind the scenes. Many an established writer, director, editor, production manager, and crew member got her start thanks to Roger. Most notably, he discovered the talents of producers-to-be Barbara Boyle (Phenomenon) and Gale Ann Hurd (Terminator, Aliens, Armageddon) at a time when Hollywood was even more of an all-male club than it is today.

I suspect that a better example for Hunt of really offensive female characters can be found in the oeuvre of the late, unlamented Russ Meyer, who used his movies to work out his own obsession with the female anatomy. I admit to a certain fascination with Meyer’s sado-masochistic girl-on-girl slugfest, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! But his much-talked-about Vixen (which I watched in the line of duty while researching the films of the late Sixties) just left me queasy. Its leading character’s exuberant sexuality is matched by her racism, her lack of scruples, and her overall bitchiness. Amazingly, in 1970, Twentieth Century-Fox gave Meyer a shot at the big time, with an assignment to direct the big-budget sexploitation flick, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. (The screenplay is by Roger Ebert, of all people, and I consider it not just trash but unwatchable.)

Nor was Meyer open to women on his creative staff. My old buddy Stan Berkowitz, who crewed on Supervixens, tells me that on the set he saw plenty of women, most of them flaunting the audacious "Guns of Navarone" bazooms that were Meyer's stock in trade. But on the production team there was not a female to be found, and the pneumatic starlets were strictly off-limits. Meyer made movies to feed his personal fixations. He wanted his crews, like himself, in a permanent state of arousal.