Day 2: Grindhouse!

It was 1976 and I was just about a teenager. (And no, dinosaurs did not roam the earth back then.). I listened to the AM radio station in Sioux Falls SD - KISD - and during that summer, about every second commercial was for the movie The Pom Pom Girls. There was lots of giggling, some innuendo, and an authoritative voice at the end: "The Pom Pom Girls. A Crown International Picture. Rated R."

I had no idea what was going on. I was too young to get the innuendo. But I had had my first brush with exploitation pictures. Grindhouse!

The idea was making lots of money with very little capital. So grindhouse movie makers like Crown International would follow this formula:

1. Make up movie posters, and take 5 or 6 of them around asking "Which movie would you want to see?"
2. Hand the #1 pick to the screenwriter and say "Make a movie for this poster."
3. Raise capital by asking your connections in strip joints, casinos, or whatever. Offer the investors a bit part in the movie.
   
4. Film! Since the people aren't actors, film one line of dialogue at a time - give them line, say action, let them say it, say cut, do the next line.
   
5. Release it and watch the money roll in!

The classic Grindhouse era ended back in the mid-70's, but there's been a resurgence of interest. (Mostly from Quentin Tarrantino/Richard Rodriguez flick "Grindhouse" a few years back). So Day two of the 360/365 Film Festival was a Grindhouse extravaganza!

I saw a new documentary called "American Grindhouse" that captured the era quite nicely. Grindhouse is not an genre like Film Noir. It's more a state of mind ... whatever titilates you and gets you in theater is A-OK! Gore. T&A. Violence. Like a carnival barker, you have to up the ante to get people into your tent. So the documentary had a lot of ground to cover, and did it very well in 90 minutes. It's coming out later this year on cable and DVD - it's worth the rental if you like film history.

"Gone With The Pope" is a masterpiece of Grindhouse cinema ... in the same way "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is a masterpiece of Science Fiction. The back story is fascinating. The lounge singer Duke Mitchell wrote, produced and directed the entire thing, but left it unfinished, unedited and in the can. About 15 years after that, a couple of intrepid editors got ahold of it, and spent the next 15 years (in between paying gigs) cleaning it up and splicing it together. They had to work from scripts scrawled on cocktail napkins and backs of envelopes.

The result is a jaw-dropping WTF??? These four mafiosos are on a boat in the middle of the ocean and one says, "We're going to kidnap the pope." Say what????? They pay $50K to get an audience with the pope, pull a gun on him, shift him off to the back room. A guy says, "Take off your clothes, your Holiness." And they switch clothes, and somehow get the pope out of the Vatican and onto a boat.

And it's all serious! The audience was rolling in the aisles, and I was too. I'll probably see better movies at this film festival, but this will probably the most entertaining when all is said and done.

So, speaking of better, my favorite movie so far has to be L'Enfer. If there's a word for "the exact opposite of Grindhouse cinema", that would fit here. The back story here is fascinating too. The director, the famous French director Henri George Clouzot, basically had an unlimited bankroll to make a masterpiece. The story was about a young couple, and the husband becomes obsessively jealous when the wife starts hanging around the town womanizer.

Pretty standard stuff. But Clouzot was looking for a new language of cinema to tell the story. He invents new camera tricks, different ways to frame shots, innovative uses of color. He wants everything to be perfect and in service to the story. The deeper he gets in, the more he erases and starts over. Clouzot is obsessed. He drives his actors nuts, driving the male lead to a nervous breakdown, then has a heart attack himself.

And his experiments are pretty much all that survive of L'Enfer. There's film for about 30% of the story, virtually no soundtrack. So how do you splice together something watchable? Well ... you blend the fictional story with the back story. So L'Enfer is a documentary about making the film. It follows the obsessions of both Clouzot and the male lead of the fictional story. They both descend into madness, and the psychological turmoil in his own mind translates to some weird stuff printed on celluoloid.

As I watch movies, I often ask myself "What am I getting here that I can't get from a novel?" I think that's why French New Wave (of which this is a part) is so powerful. And they have it in spades in L'Enfer. There's a shot of a woman tied to railroad tracks and a train racing for her. Pretty standard movie thing. But something undefinable makes you feel the railroad steel against your head, the binding of the rope, the hot breath of the locomotive coming for you. It's more than sight or sound, it's emotion communicated on some subspace channel.

So I'm talking to this guy, Josh, who sits in the same seat for each screening - back row, chair against the wall. He goes on and on about why it's perfect. The theater curves inwards a little, so the back seat has a little extra space for you to swing your legs. The speaker is above you so the sound comes from "out of the sky". "This place is sacred to me," he says.

And I think ... OK, so we just saw a movie about how obsession drives you to madness and heart attacks. Have you learned nothing?

Of course not! We're humans! And we will keep on learning nothing for as long as it takes.