Carmageddon --- The Monster That Ate L.A.?

Carmageddon is here, and it’s not pretty. Everybody knows about L.A.’s longstanding love affair with the automobile. Well, this weekend the exasperating but invaluable 405 Freeway—which normally trundles masses of L.A. motorists from the bedroom communities of the San Fernando Valley toward the ocean, the airport, and parts beyond—is totally shut down. It’s the price we Angelenos pay for a freeway widening that will result in more lanes and, inevitably, more cars and more gridlock.

Movies, of course, have helped to glamorize the connection between Southern California and its automobiles. Think of all those scenes where the hero tools down Pacific Coast Highway in a sun-kissed convertible, or the bad guy slaloms through the curves on Mulholland Drive in a lethal-looking sports coupe. When TV was coming into its own, the popular detective show 77 Sunset Strip brought stardom to Edd “Kookie” Byrnes as a young hipster with the most L.A. of job descriptions: valet parking guy.

But Carmageddon (the word sounds like Pixar’s take on a disaster movie) reminds me that some films do acknowledge that bane of modern existence, the traffic jam. Jean-Luc Godard has been French cinema’s enfant terrible for more than five decades. Back in 1967 he captured moviegoers’ attention with a dark comedy called Weekend. Its centerpiece is an eight-minute tracking shot of a horrendous traffic stoppage, complete with blaring car-horns on the sound track, that throws a quiet country road into near-chaos. Re-watching that footage today (thanks, YouTube!), I’m forced to confess that it doesn’t look so bad. Believe me, I’ve been in worse.

It’s often said that part of L.A.’s problem is the failure of Angelenos to support public transit. Maybe so. I once worked on a Concorde-New Horizons thriller called Final Judgement (yes, there’s a misspelling in the film’s official title). I well recall screenwriter Kirk Honeycutt, now international film critic at The Hollywood Reporter, submitting a scene in which the killer has an unnerving encounter aboard a local bus. Though this was one of the strongest, most original moments in the entire script, it was nixed by Roger Corman, who was not pleased by the idea of a villain as a bus commuter. Shrugging off Kirk’s argument that it might be fun to go against convention by depriving the bad guy of his own set of wheels, Roger decreed that the fiend should ride a cool motorcycle. And so it came to pass.

Though Roger wasn’t willing to buck convention, several big studio films have taken advantage of the apparent oxymoron of L.A. and mass transit. Speed, of course, cleverly used a city bus to take audiences on a thrill ride. The American re-make of The Italian Job is an all-star heist flick in which canny crooks manufacture a traffic jam as part of their plot to steal a truckload of gold. The details are fuzzy in my brain, but I recall the henchmen’s cars, Mini Coopers of all things, actually zooming onto the rails of L.A.’s fledgling Metro to make a quick getaway. (Eventually, the gang says adios to Los Angeles—perversely enough—on the Coast Starlight.) I’m also a fan of Michael Mann’s Collateral. This atmospheric suspense drama starts with a taxi driver cruising L.A.’s night-time streets and alleys, but ends in a tense shoot-out as hero and villain pursue one another through the cars of the city’s near-empty subway. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll stick to driving my Toyota.

Fans of Slumber Party Massacre: Their Hearts Are Young and Gay

It’s Outfest time in Los Angeles. L.A.’s oldest film festival, founded in 1982 to showcase movies that resonate with the gay community, should draw 40,000 fans over ten days. I suspect a fair number of Outfest’s sixty-four offerings will be outrageous sex comedies and sensitive coming-out-of-the-closet dramas. But there’ll also likely be a horror film or two. From working on the Slumber Party Massacre trilogy, I’ve learned that films of this ilk have a substantial gay following.

The question is—why would a young gay male want to watch a gaggle of pubescent girls in lingerie fend off a rapist/killer/creep armed with a phallic electric drill? For answers, I turned to two experts. Jason Paul Collum, a filmmaker whose work includes Something to Scream About, recently wrote, produced, and directed “Sleepless Nights: Revisiting the Slumber Party Massacres.” This documentary is a featured extra in the new Slumber Party Massacre box-set that’s part of Shout! Factory’s Roger Corman collection. Tony Brown, a serious fan of the genre and creator of the Old Hockstatter Place website, helped out as co-writer and associate producer of "Sleepless Nights.” As a gay man, Tony appreciates the Slumber Party movies for “their sense of sisterhood, basically. . . All the girls team up together to help defeat the killer.”

Jason Collum explains that “women-in-jeopardy films as a whole appealed to me as a teenager because I was associating myself with the heroine of each film. I wasn't enjoying watching her get tormented. I was enjoying watching her survive. Overcoming the odds. Here was someone going through the worst time of her life, but she was coming out on top. Battered, bloodied and bruised, she was still beating the bad guys. That's how—in some pseudo-psychological way—I was trying to just get through teen angst and my feeling of everyone being out to get me.”

Growing up, Jason “always hung out with the girls. . . . Most of my childhood was spent adoring my mother and aunts. Strong women, like Wonder Woman, or the women I later viewed in horror films, drew my attention in particular. Maybe it had to do with having something of a more feminine side than most of the straight men in my life.” From his perspective, “when you look at a horror film, and you see an initially defenseless girl who more often than not is being tormented by a brute of a man using some phallic symbol (which Slumber Party Massacre in particular does very pointedly, right down to the ‘castration’ of his ‘big drill’ at the end), I think psychologically there's something going on in a gay man's head.”

Like other gay males I’ve talked to, Jason and Tony value big studio pictures like Brokeback Mountain for teaching the general public to empathize with specifically gay problems. But for their own pleasure, they much prefer the low-budget and the lurid. The movie Tony remembers most fondly from 2005 is not Brokeback Mountain but rather Jason’s shot-on-video October Moon, a gay male version of Fatal Attraction that ends in a pool of blood. Blood, of course, also spurts in the Slumber Party film trio, but Jason too focuses on the camaraderie: “The girls in each film are pretty, enjoyable, and fun-loving. They're the girls you wanted to hang out with in high school. They were strong, independent. . . . Nobody was trying to steal anybody's boyfriend. And once the mayhem begins, they generally stick together.”

Slumber Party Massacre 3: My Son the Serial Killer

Yes, I worked on Slumber Party Massacre 2. And, though I’m somewhat abashed to admit it, my son made his screen debut in the film’s quickie follow-up, which naturally enough is called Slumber Party Massacre 3.

The three Slumber Party movies have been getting some attention lately because they’ve been reissued by Shout! Factory, as part of its series of Roger Corman Cult Classics. (Obviously, the definition of a classic is not the same for everyone.) To round out the collection, serious fans Jason Paul Collum and Tony Brown contributed a “Sleepless Nights” documentary, for which they interviewed everyone they could find who had a hand in the making of the films.

That meant I spent a blustery afternoon at Shout! Factory videotaping my recollections. I discussed why Roger Corman liked handing the reins of these highly sexualized films to female directors, and how the third film in the series was conceived to fill a hole in the schedule at Corman’s Venice, California studio. I also revealed the story of my son’s participation.

The maniacal driller-killer in the third Slumber Party film (known to its makers as SPAM3) is a boy-next-door type gone wrong. In the shorthand of so many horror films of the era, his underlying problem is that he was molested as a child by an evil uncle. The filmmakers needed a photograph of a very young Ken (yes, Ken!) with creepy Uncle Billy, to use as a climactic explanation of the bad guy’s warped psyche. My son Jeffrey was a cute eight-year-old, and so he was a natural choice. I took him down to the studio, where he obligingly climbed all over the production assistant (a nice guy with kids of his own) who would supply the slightly sinister face of Uncle Billy.

Then I found myself on the horns of a moral dilemma. Director Sally Mattison decided the backstory should be made clearer. So several flashback scenes were written for little Ken and his uncle. In them nothing visually disturbing happened, but the innuendo was unmistakable. Would Jeffrey participate? At first I was amused and pleased at this chance for my son to make his acting debut. But then I started to worry. What if somehow the implications of these scenes seeped into Jeffrey’s subconscious? What if, years later, he’d find himself traumatized? That’s how maternal guilt stood in the way of his fledgling acting career. (P.S. The scenes were never shot.)

I don’t regret my choice. But I do regret that Roger Corman, in his infinite wisdom, decided to strip this story—and my entire interview—out of the finished documentary. Jason Collum and Tony Brown complained loudly, but to no avail. For additional Slumber Party trivia, check out Tony’s ultimate fan site, which he calls The Old Hockstatter Place. There you’ll find several versions of the Uncle Billy picture, along with news of such tasteful giveaways as a Slumber Party Massacre blood-stained pillowcase (while supplies last) to commemorate the release of this cinematic landmark.

Whitey Bulger: The Godfather, Part IV

So they got Whitey Bulger, just down the street from the rehab facility where my mom is recuperating from a fractured pelvis. It’s a quiet street: folks walk their dogs there, and take strolls toward the ocean two blocks away. Bulger, on the lam after racketeering, narcotics, and murder charges put him at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list, had slipped into Santa Monica fifteen years ago. He and his longtime lady friend posed as a mild-mannered pair of retirees, shopping at the 99 Cents store and becoming familiar faces to neighborhood residents. Bulger’s arrest on June 22 was a great moment for law enforcement, as well as for the geriatric folks whose day was brightened by all the TV vans and other commotion in the vicinity.

The thought of Whitey Bulger growing old and grey in Santa Monica put me in mind of Henry Hill, the leading character (played by Ray Liotta) in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. In the course of that film, Hill (based on a real-life mob henchman) swindles, robs, murders, and betrays; by the end he is under the wing of the Witness Protection Program, surviving a dull, law-abiding life in suburbia. His final voiceover tells the tale: “I'm an average nobody. . . I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” Scorsese’s film is a brilliant exposé of a Mafia sidekick, but -- from what I hear --Whitey Bulger played second fiddle to no man. So, though of course I’m relieved that he was arrested peaceably, without recourse to any of the thirty weapons he apparently had stashed in his modest apartment, I can’t help feeling slightly disappointed that his demise was so, well, uncinematic.

Yes, I’m a sucker for the classic gangster films of the 1930s. Those early crime-does-not-pay flicks, with their dramatic finales, set the pattern for decades of movie bad guys. (Warning: spoilers ahead!) Remember James Cagney in The Public Enemy unexpectedly coming home in a box? Remember Paul Muni in Scarface, felled in a shoot-‘em-out with the coppers? Best of all, remember Edward G. Robinson as Caesar Enrico Bandello in Little Caesar? In a sorry state following a life of crime, he is lured from his flophouse by his nemesis on the police force.. When Sgt. Flaherty guns him down beneath a billboard that bears the image of his glamorous former love, he raises his eyes to the heavens and utters a deathless line, “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

Over the decades, the endings of gangster movies have kept getting bigger. White Heat (1949) has one of the all-time great death scenes, featuring gunfire, explosions, and Cagney on high shouting, “Made it, Ma. Top of the world!” I don’t pretend that the characters played by Cagney and the others were heroes. But they were bold, forceful, charismatic figures, pursuing the American Dream on their own terms. As a red-blooded American, I can’t help rooting for guys like these on the movie screen, if not in real life. They went out in a blaze of glory. Whitey Bulger, though, met his fate quietly—not with a bang but with a whimper.

Chuck Palahniuk and Manuel Muñoz: Reading in the Dark

Chuck Palahniuk has talent to burn. He’s best known for the outrageously brutal Fight Club, which of course was the source material for David Fincher’s notorious 1999 film. So when he took on the adult movie industry in Snuff, he presumably had some inside knowledge about the way films are made. But Snuff is less a realistic look at the dark side of moviemaking than an opportunity to shock and outrage his readership. The blurb on the book jacket proudly proclaims, “From the master of literary mayhem and provocation, a full-frontal Triple-X novel that goes where no American work of fiction has gone before.” Since the book’s subject is a porn star’s assault on the world record for serial fornication on camera, how could Snuff be otherwise than deliberately, extravagantly tasteless?

The telling is clever, darting among the points of view of three of the six hundred men lined up to copulate with the fading star. And Palahniuk has fun dabbling in porno queen Cassie Wright’s filmography, giving her leading roles in such adults-only masterpieces as Lay Misty for Me and Sperms of Endearment. An author who names his villain Branch Bacardi definitely has his tongue in his cheek, or someplace infinitely nastier.

But in writing about the way of all flesh, Palahniuk seems to have precious little interest in genuine human emotion. Which brings me to a small first novel by Manuel Muñoz, just published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. What You See in the Dark is a tour-de-force melding of the world of movies and the much narrower world of Bakersfield, California in the late 1950s. In Muñoz’s artful telling, the story of a small town love affair gone wrong intertwines with the brief visit to Bakersfield of an unnamed Hollywood actress and director, there to shoot a scene or two for a movie that is obviously Psycho. While in town, they do a casual location scout, casing a few roadside motels for visual ideas, and the actress picks up from the sad, lonely proprietress of one of them some character notes she will incorporate into her movie role. Later (in a narrative that uses time with great creativity), we will see that same sad, lonely proprietress watch Psycho in a local movie house, and recoil in disgust from the sordid doings the film portrays.

As in Psycho, there’s a brutal murder in this novel, but the story is never a direct parallel of Hitchcock’s familiar one. Instead, the two plotlines bounce off of one another in ways that are always intriguing. Muñoz’s central characters—a shy young Mexican girl who works in a shoe store, the handsome local stud, his careworn mother (who combines waitress chores with the running of that roadside motel), a respectful Mexican field hand—have lives of their own that have nothing to do with Marion Crane and Norman Bates. But these folks, and those living beside them, are starved for the romance they see on movie screens. Muñoz captures their craving for Hollywood’s magic, but also veers into the head of Hitchcock, who’s pondering (a decade after Psycho) exactly what he has wrought.

The New Violence on movie screens—violence that’s blatant and not especially artful—is what’s bothering Hitchcock. Palahniuk obviously revels in it. On the strength of What You See in the Dark, I’ll take Muñoz any day.

Bonnie and Clyde Go to War

A biographer I know, Charles J. Shields, posted a memorable entry on his “Writing Kurt Vonnegut” blog. It vividly details what happened when he approached several elderly combat veterans who, like Vonnegut himself, survived World War II’s Battle of the Bulge. Shields’ goal was to ferret out personal details that would help make Vonnegut’s wartime experience come alive. What he discovered was men who, more than sixty years later, were still traumatized by what they had seen and done on the field of battle.

A few years back, while researching the films of the landmark year 1967, I too found myself talking about the Battle of the Bulge. Director Arthur Penn, who set Hollywood on its ear with his brilliant work on Bonnie and Clyde, told me that he had served in the infantry in World War II, and that his experience at the Bulge was one he’d never forget: ““It was not glorious, not organized, nothing, nobody knew what the hell they were doing, it was just save your life and chaos.”

From Penn’s perspective, the turbulence of the Sixties sprang from the complacency of the post-war period: “After the war, there was this great wave of self-satisfaction, with America, the American family, everything was wonderful. And then some time passed, and there were the family troubles. Veteran father and the kids, and they begin acting out. And that was the beginning of the next phase.” That next phase turned up in such generation-gap movies as The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause. And then, of course, Bonnie and Clyde, which made the life of a young outlaw seem (for a while, at least) like fun.

In its day, Bonnie and Clyde was most notorious for its scenes of explicit violence, including a climactic slow-motion bullet barrage that in the words of Pauline Kael “put the sting back into death.” Penn’s handling of bloodshed in this movie came directly out of his World War II memories. He told me, “I had decided not to mollycoddle the audience about shooting and death. This, after all, was wartime. “ Penn was referring here to the fact that while Bonnie and Clyde was in production, the conflict in Vietnam was dramatically ratcheting up. The young people who championed the film—the same young people who had recently mourned the assassination of John F. Kennedy and other political heroes—were in many cases facing the military draft. Penn felt that they, and the American public as a whole, needed to see violence for what it was, up close and personal.

The notoriety of Bonnie and Clyde has faded, as other films have far surpassed it in terms of on-screen carnage. Only two years later came Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which seemed to revel in its blood-spewing finale. Down the road there were George Romero’s zombie fantasies, the brilliantly lurid films of Quentin Tarantino, and gross-out horror flicks like the Saw franchise. This trend was anticipated back in 1980 by film scholar Robert Phillip Kolker who insisted in The Cinema of Loneliness that “Penn showed the way. Bonnie and Clyde opened the bloodgates, and our cinema has barely stopped bleeding since.”

He’s right, of course. Today even the posters for the last Harry Potter film seem to foretell graphic violence. In widely-seen images, Harry, Ron, and Hermione look battered, bruised, and not in the least kid-friendly, letting potential viewers know that there will be blood.

Peter Falk: Leading Man/ Everyman

I interviewed the late Peter Falk many years ago, backstage after an L.A. production of David Mamet’s outrageous Glengarry Glen Ross. What I most remember is the rest of the cast ragging Falk about plans for the closing night festivities. To them it was obvious: “The guy with the big house should throw the party.” But Falk, the owner of that big house, gave as good as he got. When I left, the venue for the cast party was still an open question.

Reading Falk’s obits, I learned a good deal about him. I hadn’t known that he got his first glass eye at age three, following the removal of a malignant tumor. I hadn’t known that he worked as a certified public accountant (we had several of those in my family too) before the acting bug bit. I certainly didn’t know that early in his career he roomed with Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. Since at one point Hoffman and Hackman also shared quarters with a very young Robert Duvall, I’d say there was a lot of acting talent packed into some tiny New York flats.

When these unknowns hit Hollywood, all four moved into leading roles without being conventionally handsome. Their ascendancy reveals how much the movie industry had changed in the late Sixties. The key film in this regard was The Graduate, a romantic comedy whose young leading man might have been played in another era by a tall, blond Robert Redford type. In fact, when Mike Nichols began casting The Graduate, Redford himself came very close to landing the role of Benjamin Braddock. Problem was: Redford seemed much too attractive to be believable as the hapless, clueless Ben that Nichols had in mind. So the part was won by Off-Broadway actor Dustin Hoffman, who approached his audition in a state of panic, firmly convinced that he was all wrong for a romantic lead.

And a star was born, though not immediately. Lawrence Turman, producer of The Graduate, remembers being told at an early screening that his movie would have been a huge hit, if not for the miscasting of the male lead. A photo spread in Life magazine just prior to the film’s release describes the new star in terms that verge on the anti-semitic. It starts with an introductory teaser--“A homely non-hero, Dustin Hoffman, gets an unlikely role in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate” –and goes from there. According to Life, Hoffman is short, scrawny, has “skittish black-beady eyes,” and “a schnoz that looks like a directional signal.” The article bears the off-putting title “A Swarthy Pinocchio Makes a Wooden Role Real.” Somehow, though, the youth of America quickly took Hoffman’s Ben Braddock to their hearts, paving the way for such later unlikely Romeos as Ben Stiller and Seth Rogen.

Ironically, Hoffman’s buddy Gene Hackman once had a role in The Graduate too. He was cast as Mr. Robinson, oblivious spouse of the predatory Anne Bancroft character, but lost the part during the film’s rehearsal period. Not to worry: he was Oscar-nominated for playing Buck Barrow in another 1967 film, Bonnie and Clyde., Three years later he brought his Everyman quality to the Oscar-winning role of Popeye Doyle in The French Connection.

Peter Falk was an Everyman too. As TV’s Columbo, he was a blue-collar fellow, rumpled, down to earth, but remarkably shrewd. A guy, in other words, who reflected the way Americans like to see themselves. He will be missed.