Well, dear readers, I can hardly believe it. As a matter of fact, I can softly believe it, too. Can you hardly or softly believe it? January is almost at an end. Just where the hell did January go? It just started and suddenly it’s gone. Shortly, it will be February and January will be a thing of the past, until next January when January will be a thing of the present – until then, January is a thing of the future. There, I have covered the whole Past, Present, Future thing in a wholly scientific and ponderous way. I do like to begin these here notes in a wholly scientific and ponderous way. My allergies have really kicked in and my nose is running like crazy. Wait a minute. Stop the notes. Hold the phone. Ixnay on the ypingtay. “My allergies have really kicked in and my nose is running like crazy.” Look at that sentence. First of all, what did “in” ever do that my allergies should kick it? That is just heinous (heinous, do you hear me?). Second, why has my nose suddenly taken up jogging? And jogging like “crazy” of all things. Have you ever seen “crazy” jog? “Crazy” looks totally stupid whilst jogging. Can’t my nose find a better role model as a runner? What the hell am I talking about?
Well, whatever it is, it is wholly scientific and ponderous. So much so, that I feel we should all click on that wholly scientific and ponderous Unseemly Button below.
You know, dear readers, lately I’ve been talking an awful lot about the upcoming DVD release of my motion picture, The First Nudie Musical. You may have noticed that I never refer to my second motion picture. Why is that? Well, I’ll tell you why, because why should I keep such things from you? Besides, it will be wholly scientific and ponderous, and so definitely in keeping with the theme of today’s notes, which, by the way, is The Theme from A Summer Place as performed by Percy Faith.
My second motion picture, for those who don’t know, is currently entitled Naked Space and is available on DVD very inexpensively, in a full frame transfer (instead of its intended 1:85:1 ratio). I mention the full frame transfer only because when they do such a transfer they merely print the entire negative, opening up the top and bottom of the 1:85:1 ratio and exposing space which wasn’t meant to be seen. Sometimes this is not a problem, other than you get a lot of unintended head room at the top of the frame (see Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining). Sometimes, though, opening up the frame exposes things you should not be seeing (see Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining) like the tops of sets, or the bottoms of sets or other things that aren’t meant to be viewed. Therefore, in the DVD of Naked Space, you can see directly over the tops of several sets and there are a few other unseemly things exposed as well. But I digress. Prior to the film being called Naked Space it was called Spaceship. Why the title change? Because some new company bought the video rights to the film and saw that Leslie Nielsen was one of the stars, and decided to capitalize on the Naked Gun movies. However, I digress. Prior to the film being called Spaceship it was called The Creature Wasn’t Nice. Yes, you heard it here, dear readers, this one little film has had three titles. Why? Well, therein lies the tale.
Back in 1981, six years to the day that The First Nudie Musical went before the cameras, I started shooting The Creature Wasn’t Nice, kind of a musical comedy send-up of Alien and all those fifties sci-fi movies like It! The Terror Beyond Space (which Alien was ripped off from) – you know, the alien is on the spaceship films. We’d assembled a wonderful company – Cindy Williams, Leslie Nielsen, Patrick Macnee, Gerritt Graham and myself were the ensemble cast of five. Plus Broderick Crawford as the abusive, emotionally unstable voice of the computer, Max. And, in a scene in which our characters watch a movie on the spaceship (well, a supposed coming attraction for a movie), Dirty Harry Strikes Back, we had Paul Brineger as Clint Eastwood/Harry, and Kenneth Tobey as the Mayor (Mr. Brineger, then seventy-five, had worked with Clint in Rawhide, and Ken Tobey starred in the original The Thing). Anyway, the shoot was a ton of fun, and more importantly, the dailies were absolutely hilarious. But, I made a key mistake and it was a mistake that you never want to make as a director. I allowed myself to be talked into hiring an editor who, while having a lot of credits, was basically a television editor with no real creativity. I’d met with several young Roger Corman editors and my instinct was to go with one of them, but, as I said, I got talked into the “old pro”. Now, you’d think I would have learned, because on Nudie, the original editor was a real old pro, Gene Ruggiero, who’d cut Ninotchka and Around the World in Eighty Days. A fine editor, no doubt, but one who, on Nudie, was slumming and who hadn’t worked in fifteen years. He was the total wrong choice for that film and we ended up having to fire him, and I ended up cutting it with his assistant (and thereby getting five educations in filmmaking in twelve weeks).
So, cutting to the chase (a lovely editing metaphor which is wholly scientific and ponderous), this editor took these hilarious dailies, did his editor’s rough cut, and made them totally unfunny in every possible way. I then spent the next six weeks trying to undo what he’d done and make it funny. But, that becomes difficult when the thing has gone so far awry. You get that in your head, and then you spend all your time trying to figure out how to undo it, rather than spending time trying to fix things creatively and get back to what you know was there in the first place. And this editor was simply no help – strictly by the numbers. We should have fired him, but we didn’t. I pressed on as best I could (remember that a good editor is like a second set of eyes, creatively, because, as writer/director/actor, you’re just too close to the damn thing sometimes. Anyway, I got it to where I thought it was presentable. I’d jettisoned most of the “improvised” additional footage we shot, and poor Dirty Harry was gone in its entirety, because I felt it slowed the film’s momentum at a time when it shouldn’t be slowed. In other words, once The Creature was discovered on the spaceship, I felt that all the scenes needed to have tension, and Dirty Harry just took us out of that. Painful to lose? Of course. So, we booked two private previews at MGM and we got the word out and filled them to capacity in hours.
I gave the customary “work print – temp music” speech, and then the lights went down and the film started. The first scene got a laugh which literally rocked the theater. Then the titles, and then the second scene came on and got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever been priveleged to hear. I thought, “Thank goodness, we’re home free.” Oops, unfortunately, I’d thought too soon. The rest of the film worked in sputters – it would go ten minutes without any laughs, then suddenly get a good laugh, then just lie there like so much fish. The good news was, that when they weren’t laughing they were tense, because until we actually revealed The Creature, they weren’t sure which way we were going, and they actually screamed twice. When the film’s setpiece, the song I Want To Eat Your Face, came on, I was ready for it to bring the house down. It didn’t. It virtually got no laughs at all. Disaster, thought I. Anyway, mercifully the film came to an end. We had a post-mortem afterwards, and we all knew we had troubles ahead.
The next day I went back into the cutting room at six in the morning. I worked until twenty minutes before the next preview. I tightened scenes, put a couple of improvised bits back in, and most importantly, totally recut I Want To Eat Your Face, incorporating an important lesson I’d learned on Nudie – which is that sometimes the reaction is funnier than the action or dialogue (or in this case, song) itself. I drove the print over to MGM and the screening began. Again, the first two scenes got huge laughs. The rest of the film seemed much improved in terms of the reaction. And when I Want To Eat Your Face came on, this time it did indeed bring the house down. We all felt much much better. I spent the next three weeks fine tuning and tweaking the film, recording the original score (by David Spear), and dubbing the film (adding the fx, foley, etc.). But I’d made one other key mistake and I had no idea how harmful that mistake could be (not deadly, but definitely harmful). However, to hear the rest of the tale (what that second mistake was, and then how The Creature Wasn’t Nice became Spaceship) tune in to tomorrow’s notes, which, by the way, will not be wholly scientific and ponderous.
I watched the first two acts of the Fosse DVD last night. First of all, the show changed quite a bit from when I saw it in its pre-Broadway run at the Ahmanson, here in Los Angeles, California. Mostly for the better, but not always. I do know the show was taped at the very end of its run, and it shows – the dancers are certainly talented, but they are frequently sloppy and that is unforgivable in a show called Fosse. I didn’t think the original company was all that great, either, and that was one of my big probles with the show as a show. Also, the fact that none of the numbers were given context and we came out of the theater knowing nothing, really, about Mr. Fosse. Somehow, at the end of Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, we really did seem to know something about Mr. Robbins. In any case, this DVD gave me a big headache. It is ineptly directed (for the camera) with much bad cutting and bad camera placement – it seems like the director went out of his way to be where he shouldn’t be at any given moment. I hate cutting like this, which interrupts the flow of the number. One wishes to see the choreography in a show called Fosse, that’s really the point. But it’s so cutty that sometimes you never even know the geography of the people on stage. And here is a lesson all people who direct musicals need to learn: DO NOT EVER HAVE A SHOT OF DISEMBODIED FEET. What is the point of a shot of feet doing a step, without the rest of the person? There is no point, and yet they never learn this lesson. Did Fred Astaire ever have a shot of his fershluganah feet? No, full body, baby, with an occasional waist up shot (not very often, though). Did Gene Kelly ever have a shot of fershluganah feet? No. Feet are meaningless without the person attached to them. And may we talk about the sound mix? I’ve never heard anything like this in all my days. It’s a very aggresive 5.1 mix, which is fine. But the surrounds are frequently ear-splittingly loud – when applause occurs it’s like you have one thousand maniacs clapping directly into your eardrums. And, here’s the most ridiculous part: They’ve put a good deal of the band in the rear speakers. So, not only do you have one thousand clapping maniacs next to you, you also have a synthesizer player and a trumpet playing as if they were in the chair next to you. These people should just hire me and be done with it. It’s not brain surgery, really it isn’t. It is fun to see some of the numbers though (I do love Steam Heat), some of which are identified by subtitle, some of which aren’t, which makes the whole thing confusing. Ben Vereen and Ann Reinking are the nominal stars, but they are basically wasted in more ways than one. I don’t know, the whole thing seems overwrought – even the lighting is pretentious. I don’t know that Mr. Fosse would have approved of this thing at all.
My goodness, these notes have been wholly scientific and ponderous, but most of all these notes have been long. Tune in tomorrow for the end of The Creature Wasn’t Nice/Spaceship/Naked Space saga. It’s a corker.