Schlock movie producer and independent cinema luminary Roger Corman passed a few weeks back, at the astonishing age of 98. I almost broke my self-imposed exile to write about it, but there were already so many pieces about it, so much love from the community, I didn't really know what I could add to it. BUT WHEN HAS THAT EVER STOPPED ME BEFORE YAMIRITEYALL?!
I was a fan of Corman’s calm and measured persona, and was fascinated by the man who had been such a key figure in so many other successful artists' lives - Nicholson, Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Spheeris, Sayles, Howard, Fonda, Hopper, Dern, Ladd, Cameron, Demme, and even Shatner.
But let's be honest, most of his movies aren't as good as "Targets" or "Boxcar Bertha." Or even "Piranha."
I don't say that as obnoxious fanboy dismissal. He aimed for a certain target, which was to make a movie that would definitely make money, and though he would famously and humorously say he only lost money on one movie ever, I think he ultimately turned a profit on that one as well before he passed. (I guess nobody counts his "Fantastic Four" movie, as it was technically never released, but that one seems an interesting rounding error.) So, if success is measured solely by setting a goal and surpassing it, then he was very successful, indeed.
Corman famously had a formula of what profitable movies include, meaning large doses of violence and nudity. He had a specific checklist, and as long as you hit all the boxes, and stayed under budget, legend had it you could pretty much do what you want, which was what allowed the auteurs and mavericks to show their stuff. I'm not sure that extended past the 70s... you don't really hear much about the breakaway talent that emerged from movies like "Sharkopus vs. Whalewolf" or "Sting of the Black Scorpion." Again, I don't say that to insult anyone, I've worked with the director of two of Corman's latter day "Death Race" movies, the man is insanely talented.
But, I think we all can see there was a certain window where the up-and-coming Film Brats were able to strut their stuff, using their time with Corman to springboard their careers, and that window was the 60s and 70s. Corman seemed more open to experimentation in the 60s and 70s, which makes sense, EVERYBODY was more open in those days. Studios were putting out some gnarly stuff, flinging shit at every wall to see what stuck. And once the auteur age was over, and the 80s roared to cocaine life, seems like the experimentation phase was also over, and it was on to “Carnosaur,” etc. Corman also made a name for himself delivering foreign cinema to the drive-ins, his version of bringing Shakespeare to the groundlings; but sadly, where went the drive-ins, so apparently went Corman’s involvement with Fellini and Kurosawa.
But he certainly did more than his part to innovate cinema, which is more than a lot of us can say.
I’ve written before about how living in LA, a random night out can sometimes become the event of the year. In October of 2016, Alison and I were lucky enough to be smack dab in the center of one of those experiences. We went to a live staged reading of “The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes,” a script written about Roger Corman making the movie “The Trip.”
Joe Dante, the director of “Gremlins” and “The Burbs,” had been trying for years to get a movie version off the ground, and it hadn’t ever quite launched. So I believe this reading was partly to gin up interest, but failing that, to honor the man so many icons admired. Bill Hader starred as Corman, and he was staggeringly hilarious. I hadn’t quite caught onto him yet, as I would later with “Barry” and “Documentary Now,” but this put him on the map for me. He did a great job evoking Corman’s calm, even though nobody could stop laughing at it, including Hader. Jason Ritter, Ethan Embry, Claudia O’Doherty and other actors rounded up the cast, but I kept finding myself distracted by who was in the audience, rather than up on the stage. Dante, Corman himself, and Peter Bogdanovich, in his trademark ascot, sat near the front, while a host of Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes folk took up the rest (and in a fun coincidence, one of the companies producing the event, Spectrevision, would four years later be instrumental in getting Ali’s movie made). It felt like we had been accidentally invited to a secret Hollywood party.
Near the end of the reading, they brought Corman onstage to play off Hader, and it was delightful to watch. It really was one of those nights that you know is special, and can never be replicated. I try not to buy merchandise at plays and such these days - as I’ve mentioned, I’m trying to be less of a collector - but that night, I couldn’t help myself, purchasing one of the limited edition prints they had made for the show.
And even though I’m in the midst my midlife purge, I’m grateful to still have it.
Whenever I get a hiatus, I tend to start re-binging older shows. I’ve blazed through a bunch of old favs of late, and in true “Hold Up” fashion, figured I’d share.
TWIN PEAKS - THE RETURN
(Actually, being perfectly honest, I didn’t just watch “Twin Peaks Season 3,” I’ve been on a whole David Lynch thing all month. “Wild at Heart,” “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” “The Elephant Man,” and of course, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” There’s certain media, once I start, I have to watch the whole thing; the “Back to the Future” trilogy, the first two “Godfather” movies, “The Wire,” the list goes on. “Twin Peaks” used to be on that list. I’ve seen the whole series several times, all the way through, because I never could stop myself once I started. I somehow broke my own programming, as I watched the first season of “Twin Peaks,” and somehow managed to NOT watch the whole second season, skipping pretty much to “The Return,” short-circuiting decades of rigidity. Yes, I know the second season is mightily up and down, but I still love it, god help me.)
I watched “The Return” week to week when it originally premiered, and shared the collective awe of Frost & Lynch’s creation returned to life, and the teeth-gnashing frustration that was Dougie Jones. When “The Return” ended, it was almost a worse feeling than when the second season ended - when Agent Cooper cackled in front of the broken mirror in season two, it was softened somewhat by knowing they’d been hoping to continue the series, but were cancelled, making it a somewhat unintended ending (though an appropriate one, if you consider the bleakness of most Lynch movies). When “The Return” ended on a similar ambiguous note, knowing this was intentional, it was somewhat more horrific. I felt a little torn open by it. I don’t want to say too much if you haven’t seen it, but whereas the second season ended well within the circle it had begun, “The Return” had broken the barriers of the show, and even the movie, and had moved into whole new territory, so when it ended, the ambiguity felt like a larger, blacker abyss Lynch had tossed us into. “Make sense of that,” he seemed to dare us.
Watching “The Return” again, one after another, I was struck by how much more coherent it was than the first time watching it over the course of months. I was able to see the plot threads build… slowly, but they were there. When Lynch declared “The Return” was less a TV show than an 18-hour movie, I rolled my eyes like everyone else. Now I think he was really onto something. The series moves like a movie, not a show. Individual units of episodes are only there to give you an intermission, not a conclusion. It’s fascinating. And even the agonizing teeth-pulling stasis of Dougie Jones seemed more immediate. There were still a lot of extraneous plot points I wondered about, but this time around, I was able to chalk it up to Lynch wanting to give the audience what they wanted… a look at their favorite Twin Peaks’ characters 25 years later, whether or not they actually had anything interesting going on. Sure, it’d be nice if Peggy Lipton’s character had a more engaging plot going on, but then again, just seeing her long-standing threads from the original series quietly wrapping up here had its own charm. Given that so many of the actors passed before, during and after filming, I’m glad we got to see so many of them again, and sort of button up the show that had changed the face of TV.
“The Return” is definitely not for everyone. Certainly not for people who weren’t that into “Twin Peaks” to start with. But I found a second viewing incredibly rewarding. And the imagery is some of Lynch’s best. Having just rewatched his first feature “Eraserhead,” I saw so many little ideas that he started with forty-odd years ago finally seeing their ultimate form, they were really interesting bookends to such an intense career. (I mean, I say “bookends” because he seems disinclined to rush into the next thing and he’s getting on in age, but hopefully he does more.)
MINDHUNTER
Much like “Twin Peaks,” this was another of those “Beloved but Cancelled” series, where we will likely never see a proper conclusion. Overseen by David Fincher, this show explored the early days of the FBI profiling serial killers, the science that went into it, and the people who had to slowly piece that science together, making plenty of mistakes along the way.
Cancelled by Netflix (or maybe David Fincher himself, depending on what you read), the series was never able to reach its apex, and as it stands, is mostly two seasons of build-up to a climax that we’ll never see. The creators made no secret that the show was supposed to end with the capture of the infamous BTK Killer, and so, each show had a little vignette with BTK, showing him operating in secret, and how he managed to stay under the radar for so long. Now, at least in the world of “Mindhunter,” he remains at large forever.
That aside, this series has lost none of its power. The leads are terrific, and the writing is great. A spiritual sequel to Fincher’s “Zodiac,” this movie shows the frustrating, almost boring day-to-day details of trying to get this special department of the FBI off the ground. We who came of age in the 70s/80s have grown up in serial killer culture, and the idea that someone had to invent the idea of psychological profiling seems a foregone conclusion, but as the series depicts, it was a notion that met with intense, horrified resistance. We can’t study the minds of these crazy people! What could we possibly learn, except more depravity? If you like movies like “Silence of the Lambs” or “Manhunter,” this is the show for you, showing the origins of where those movies came from, with FBI agents methodically interviewing captured serial killers like the Son of Sam, Richard Speck, and eventually, even Charles Manson (played by the same actor who played Manson, in a funny bit of behind-the-scenes coincidence, in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”), as they try and solve current murders with their knowledge.
Ed Kemper is the show’s Hannibal Lector, a shockingly self-aware serial killer in captivity who gives the agents their first glimpses into the mind of a mass murderer. Not only a funny comic foil to the uptight agents, Kemper stands as a constant reminder to the protagonists how little they know. He was only caught, he reminds them, because he turned himself in. There are plenty of killers who don’t want to be caught, and as he calmly tells them, they never will be, fueling the agents’ fire to figure this profiling thing out.
Horrifying and gut-churning though the subject matter is, most of the show’s tension comes from the characters as they try and maintain normal lives of significant others, children, and jobs, and how the job eats at them. But none of them can look away. A family BBQ becomes fraught when an agent who’s been wanting to talk to SOMEBODY about this stuff starts unloading to the fascinated crowd, with his wife gently trying to shut it down.
I’ve seen this show twice through, and it’s still great. It kills me that we don’t have more, because as awesome as these two seasons are, they really are part of a deliberate slow build, and when the ending gets clipped, there’s a big empty hole. Still, better to have these two seasons than none at all. I guess.
THE GOOD PLACE
A group of people wake up in the afterlife, and happily discover they’re in The Good Place, which happens to have a lot of frozen yogurt shops. The show is a delightful and funny meditation on ethics, existentialism, and all them big life questions we’ll never get the answers to.
There’s lots about this show I admire, and most of it I can’t discuss without giving some funny stuff away, so I’ll focus on a couple things. One, the actors are great. Ted Dansen is a kick as an almighty immortal being, shepherding the characters through their afterlives, and Kristen Bell fills the hole in my life I didn’t know I needed filled (ew), portraying a hilarious trash fire of a human from Arizona (I relate), who has been mistakenly installed in The Good Place, as she desperately tries to learn how to be good so she can stay. I’ve loved Bell since “Veronica Mars,” and she’s gotten a whole nuther life in my household as a Disney Princess in “Frozen,” so for this mid-career surprise to pop up makes me giddy. The rest of the cast, rounded out by people I’d never seen before but are becoming mainstays in Hollywood, is great, and bring amazing energy.
And the show is smart. It packs a lot of high- (and low-) minded shit into a 21-minute run time, and it’s not afraid to move quickly. Plots that would normally take up whole seasons of other shows are tossed off in single episodes, a high-wire act that makes you wonder where else they could possibly go with it, then getting to delight in where they take you.
I have many favorite pieces of this show, but here’s two of them: 1) Janet, the artificial, all-knowing database that helps the characters out. What could easily be a one-joke (and very annoying) character is given surprisingly wide range, and D’arcy Carden plays her (and many other roles) to perfection. 2) The denizens of the Bad Place that pop up from time to time to cause chaos. The brilliance of these (demons? devils?) is that, given they’re supposed to be pure evil, they’re played as extremely… douchey. Like, the most banal of evil, always on their phones, farting and being general loudmouthed pains in the ass. And Adam Scott is a great choice to lead them, playing Trevor with such smug, sleazy, mansplaining doucheyness, he oozes. I mean, this is the same feller who everymans through “Parks & Rec" and brilliantly mopes around “Severence” and “Party Down;” I’m impressed how many facets this guy has.
Given all that, I’m surprised to report that… it’s a nice show. Yes, like my mother used to say. Like, for all its puckish humor, and all its goofy satire, it’s surprisingly kind, asking that we give everyone the benefit of the doubt - even the worst of us. One of the best points of the show is that, no matter how good we see ourselves, no matter how hard we try, we all fall down somewhere, and usually badly, so really, we have no choice but to give each other grace.
So just, y’know, don’t be a douche.
SUGAR
(Yes, this is a new show I’ve only seen once, but I can’t help myself.)
A modern noir featuring Colin Farrell as a guy who finds missing persons and loves hisself some movies, John Sugar is hired to find the missing granddaughter of a famous Hollywood producer. In the best film noir tradition, twists and turns abound, not the least of which is figuring out exactly what is going on with Sugar himself. There’s something he’s not telling us, even as he gives us just about everything else in old-fashioned movie voiceover.
It’s another show that has some good moments I don’t want to ruin, so suffice to say it’s a nice surprise for me - fully wearing its love of the classic Hollywood noirs on its sleeve, but not afraid to be plopped in the present. Farrell is one of those actors I wrote off early on, and have spent the time since regretting my error - for every Bullseye he plays, there’s a Penguin, or a Sugar, and he always finds something new to mine.
The rest of the cast is a who’s who, from James Cromwell to Amy Ryan to Denis Boutsikaris to Anna Gunn (star of “The Apology,” my wife Alison Star Locke’s movie; yes, I just plugged to y’all), all of them putting in their usual nuanced work. When an actor like Miguel Sandoval is playing a bit part, it tells you the caliber of the cast. And Eric Lange plays an absolute skin-crawler of a villain. It’s not often that I actually feel genuine danger vibrating off movie and TV villains, and he nails it, playing a down-in-the-dirt human trafficker with all the boo-hiss smarm you could hope for.
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