BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH. / SEPTEMBER 2014

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Job#: SHI14074 L/S: 150 Size: 8.156 x 10.875” BMD ad Richard Pub: Alamo Drafthouse

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THE BEST OF THE LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

CONTENTS

THE MOVIES

Nick Cave Lives in Imagination

When The Mafia Wanted To Whack THE GODFATHER

NIHILISM MASSACRE! Eight Movies That Prove Why War Veterans Can Never Go Home Again

Nick Cave In The Movies

Talkie Terror: The Transition From Silent Film To Sound

drafthouse.com badassdigest.com birthmoviesdeath.com drafthousefilms.com fantasticfest.com mondotees.com

GREAT WHITE, The Great JAWS Rip-Off

Welcoming THE GUEST Home: A Q&A With Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett

Video Vortex: DOCTOR BLOODBATH And The Anti-Human Legacy Of Nick Millard

Prost! On Marzenbier And Oktoberfest

Editor-in-ChiefDevin Faraci Managing EditorMeredith Borders Associate PublisherHenri Mazza Art DirectorJoseph A. Ziemba Graphic DesignersZach Short, Stephen Sosa, Kelsey Spencer Copy EditorGeorge Bragdon Contributing WritersRuss Fischer, Devin Faraci, Zack Carlson, Joseph A. Ziemba, Jeremy Smith, Adan De La Torre, Tommy Swenson Public Relations InquiriesBrandy Fons | brandy@fonspr.com

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★★★★“BLOODY HILARIOUS!

ONE HELL OF A FUN NIGHT OUT”

-The Toronto Star

BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH. / SEPTEMBER 2014

Nick Cave does it all. He’s a legendary musician, sure, but he’s also a screenwriter and a novelist as well as an actor. He’s written an introduction for a standalone edition of The Gospel According To Mark and he has received an honorary doctoral degree in law.

That eclectic nature is an inspiration to us at BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH., and we’re proud to feature an interview with Cave himself this issue. Yes, this is a magazine about movies, but we understand that movies encompass so much more than just the actors and filmmakers and sets -- they cover the very breadth and depth of life itself. When you write about movies, you write about everything.

So this issue we write about Nick Cave, both specifically in relation to his new movie, 20000 DAYS ON EARTH, but also with an eye to all of his cinematic work. We write about Oktoberfest and Marzen beers not because there’s a movie about beer playing at the Alamo Drafthouse this month but because all movies go well with beer. We write about SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN through the prism of what really happened when Hollywood converted from silents to sound, giving us a chance to examine how disruptions change entire industries (something the techies in Silicon Valley love talking about). The making of THE GODFATHER offers a chance to look at a weird moment in the real Mafia’s history, when they jumped onto the Civil Rights Movement in an attempt to make the FBI look bad for chasing down Italian mobsters. And a look at GREAT WHITE -- a legendary rip-off of JAWS -- lets us play around in the world of shysters, scam artists and rip-off men. And THE GUEST, a new film from longtime favorite Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, opens a door to the world of veterans returning home, and how the movies have dealt with our boys getting back from overseas.

Having an eclectic slate is one of the things that we hope sets BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH. apart from other magazines covering similar ground; we believe that the moviegoing experience doesn’t end when the credits do, and we want to offer you something to think about, turn over and consider after the movie is over.

Let us know how we’re doing - send an email to birthmoviesdeath@drafthouse.com, or visit us at our day jobs at www.badassdigest.com. 6

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DEvIN FARACIBadass Digest Editor in Chief

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BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH. / SEPTEMBER 2014

This September, we're programming a month of all-timers! With several titles lifted right off our Alamo 100 list, we think you'll love it when the Alamo plays the hits. For tickets, showtimes, formats, and a full list of titles, visit drafthouse.com.

Screening In September at the Alamo Drafthouse

THE GODFATHERDir: Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, R, 175 min

One of the most loved, acclaimed and popular films of all time, THE GODFATHER feels just as fresh and groundbreaking today as it did in 1972. It made Al Pacino a star, it cemented Marlon Brando as the acting force of his generation and shed light on the unique and overflowing talent of Coppola. Over the years the film is mostly known in pop culture for Brando's puffy cheeks and the immense bloodshed throughout (including that infamous horse's head).

What shouldn't be forgotten, though, is that Coppola and writer Mario Puzo crafted one of the most emotional and complex studies of family, loyalty and morality ever put on film. Whether it's your first time or fiftieth experiencing THE GODFATHER, you can't help but be moved by one of the greatest films ever made (R.J. LaForce).

THE GODFATHER, PART IIDir: Francis Ford Coppola, 1974, R, 200 min

A completely different film from its predecessor in terms of narrative structure and tone, THE GODFATHER, PART II fulfills the cliché of being a sequel that delivers and, in some ways, surpasses the original. Following the drama surrounding the Corleone family at the end of the first film, PART II takes two decidedly unexpected detours: One into history, the other into politics.

In the present much of the film’s focus is on the FBI investigation of the mob in New York, predominantly the sects lead by Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). In the past the film tells the story of a young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro). These time framing devices make the film’s 3-plus hour runtime fly by and the Vito story gives deep emotional context and resonance not only to this film, but to the THE GODFATHER, as well. Coppola parallels the life and transformation of Michael Corleone to that of his father.

Coppola weaves all of these narrative threads together masterfully and achieves the unbelievable task of making a film worthy enough to follow his earlier masterpiece. A wholly different experience in every respect. It’s less mythic, but much more epic, both in emotion and scope. One of the most ambitious sequels ever made. (R.J. LaForce)

ROBOCOPDir: Paul Verhoeven, 1987, R, 102 min

Part Man, part machine....ALL HERO. ROBOCOP is one of the greatest action/social-satire/all-around badass movies to have ever been made. It's tough, it's mean, it's dirty and it's made with 100% real moving parts. Paul Verhoeven is an absolute genius and Peter Weller will annihilate you with his anguished robot cop constructed from leftover pain and rage.

The Detroit of the future is riddled with crime and poverty (in the future, right?), and Omni Consumer Products has just announced that they've purchased the Detroit PD. Alex Murphy roams the streets as a tough-as-nails cop ready to serve and protect until (SPOILER ALERT!) he finds himself on the wrong end of a shotgun party. OCP owns Murphy's corpse and decides to take what's left of him to create their crime fighter of the future: ROBOCOP. At first, everything is all fine and dandy; Robo is cleaning up the streets with his trusty partner Ann Lewis at his side until... Robocop starts having Alex Murphy's memories.

Come quietly or there will be... trouble. Get your prime directives in order, grab your tickets and prepare for a cinematic experience that will BLOW YOUR MIND! Now I'd buy that for a dollar. (Greg MacLennan)

SINGIN' IN THE RAINDir: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952, 103 min

To say this movie is merely a “masterpiece” is doing it a disservice. To lump it in with all the other movies that are just great is unfair.

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SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN transcends its medium and tap dances straight into your heart. It's a film you can watch on a cold night and feel it flush your face with warmth. It’s a song you can sing when rain is pouring down on you and you couldn't care less because you're in love. This isn't one of those classic movies you have to see because it's “important” and your viewing experience will feel anything but scholastic. You need to see this movie because YOU NEED TO SEE THIS MOVIE.

Gene Kelly is Don Lockwood, star of the silent film era at the dawn of the talkies. His longtime screen partner, Lena Lamont, smolders on the screen but is the nails on the chalkboard of Lockwood's life. As an accomplished song and dance man, Lockwood is set to transition into the era of sound, but Lena couldn't hit a note with a shotgun at close range. Leave it to aspiring actress Kathy Selden (the spectacularly adorable Debbie Reynolds) to dub over for Lena in the pictures...and in Don's heart.

That's the gist, but there's so much more. The dance numbers are electric, the singing is charming and, if you've never seen Gene Kelly move at 24 frames-per-second, you owe it to yourself to at least witness the miracle of a man with a 103 fever, who took three days to film the greatest dance number in film history.Everyone pushed themselves to the limits under choreographer/co-director (and notorious perfectionist) Gene Kelly. Debbie Reynolds's feet bled from doing the “Good Morning” routine, and Donald O'Connor sent himself to the hospital from filming the most frenetic, gut-busting three and a half minutes of self-flagellation you will ever see.

So, if you love the movies, do yourself a favor and see this one on the big screen -- whether it's the first time or the thousandth -- because it never hurts to have a song in your heart or to remind yourself what a film can do. (Greg MacLennan)

GREASEDir: Randal Kleiser, 1978, PG-13, 110 min

Like many girls of my generation, I grew up on a steady diet of GREASE. In fact, I'm pretty sure that this movie lived in the family VCR for the entirety of 1987. I memorized the lyrics to every song and became an expert at the hand jive, but more importantly, I learned about the wonderful world of High School. I couldn't wait to be a senior, when I would magically look like Olivia Newton-John (no one told me she was actually 30, not 18), stay up late at slumber parties drinking "dessert wine" then ride off into the sunset in a flying car. I should also mention that my copy of the

movie was taped from television with the more risque scenes edited out, so I had no clue that high school also meant pussy wagons and teenage pregnancy. Obviously, I was in for a rude awakening on many, many levels.

But that idyllic nostalgia that so grossly misinformed me is the same reason GREASE continues to live on in the hearts of moviegoers everywhere. This film adaptation of the 1971 musical is a pure dose of happy, a celebration of youth the way we prefer to remember it. It's got the school dance to end all school dances, the school carnival to end all school carnivals, the teen romance to end all teen romances.

And then there's the incredibly catchy soundtrack, jubilantly executed by Olivia Newton-John, John Travolta and the stellar cast. It's impossible not to sing along with this movie, which is why we're screening the film with all of the lyrics subtitled. (Like anyone doesn't know them word for word, but still.) As you sing about the risks of being a beauty school dropout or, oh, those summer nights, you'll also have props themed to the show so you get the full interactive experience.

Call up your Pink Ladies and T-Birds and join us at Rydell High, where we'll cheer on Greased Lightning, swoon over Sandy and Danny and sing ourselves silly. Because when it comes to fun, we're racing for pinks. (Sarah Pitre)

CLUELESS Dir: Amy Heckerling, 1995, PG-13, 97 min

You guys, this movie is, like, a cinematic masterpiece of the 20th century. Before reinventing Jane Austen became cliché, Amy Heckerling adapted the classic story of EMMA into a hilarious, insanely clever satire of adolescence in Beverly Hills.

This film spawned fashion trends, countless slang terms (AS IF!) and gave Alicia Silverstone a reason to exist beyond Aerosmith videos. Even after 19 years, I am still majorly, totally, butt-crazy in love with CLUELESS, and I quote it incessantly, whether I’m rolling with the homies or pausing at stop signs.Now, thanks to the subtitling magic of the Action Pack, we can say all of our favorite lines together during the film, plus there will be props to help us pretend that, for one glorious night, we're the Class of '95 at Bronson Alcott High School.

We'll play matchmaker for sweet old teachers, make a cameo at the Val party and thank an LA city bus driver for taking a chance on an unknown kid. You don't want to miss it, so slip on your Calvin Klein dress and make time in your busy pants-dropping schedule to attend. (Sarah Pitre)

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AN AMERICAN IN PARISDir: Vincente Minnelli, 1951, PG, 113 min

Gershwins' classic songs, Vincente Minnelli's colorful direction and Gene Kelly dancing his absolute heart out. This is amongst the best and brightest of Hollywood musical opulence and technical wizardry.

Academy Award Winner for Best Picture, Best Music, Best Cinematography and more, this film is more than just its accolades... it's a goddamned national treasure.

Gene Kelly stars as a down-on-his-luck painter who draws the eye of an affluent French Heiress who is interested in more than just his art. But Kelly has his heart set on someone else who is already shacked up. Mistaken identities, masquerade balls and endlessly charming Gene Kelly complicate the matters in this all-out dance-a-thon that will leave you tapping your feet and feeling facial soreness from smiling. This is Gene Kelly at his absolute best. (Greg MacLennan)

ACE vENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLSDir: Steve Oedekerk, 1995, PG-13, 90 min

"Silly and proud of it. Cheerfully gross. Best if you're under 12." Janet Maslin, New York Times

Jim Carrey reached the apex of his puerile (and brilliant) brand of humor in this quickie sequel to 1994's ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE. Do you need to hear the plot? Ace Ventura goes to Africa and encounters bat poop, wrestles a crocodile and is birthed out of a robotic rhinoceros.

Listen, it's not like Criterion has picked this for the deluxe treatment or anything, and that's because ACE VENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLS is not a good movie. But holy crap, it is funny, and perfect for the Action Pack quote-along experience. We'll give you props, subtitle the best quotes, and you'll get to down a beer or two. Admit it: ten-year-old you is envious. (John W. Smith)

JOHNNY GUITARDir: Nicholas Ray, 1954, UR, 110 min

An off-kilter but intriguingly sensational western about a saloon-madam Vienna (Joan Crawford) who learns that her wealth and power can’t buy everything as a town full of jealous landowners try to overrun her property. The eponymous male (Sterling Hayden) of Ray’s western gender and genre-bender is the film’s object of desire; a trophy cowboy returned, feuded over by the two women who wear the pants in this wild west town: Joan Crawford and the sexually frustrated rancher Emma McCall (Mercedes McCambridge). Nicholas Ray's1954 masterpiece is one of the all-time left-field wonders of the studio system, a film so subversive it's a wonder it ever got made.

Relentlessly feminist, JOHNNY GUITAR examines the costs of a woman’s independent action through lurid, violent exaggeration. A pop-culture madhouse dressed up in spurs and a cowboy hat. 6

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Nick Cave Lives in Imagination

Leave it to Nick Cave, the lanky Australian firebrand who has fronted ever-shifting rock band The Bad Seeds for over thirty years, to be both the subject of a documentary and also the film’s co-writer. Despite its unusual genesis, 20,000 DAYS ON EARTH is no sycophantic hagiography. It centers on Cave, but eschews a boilerplate rock-doc structure. Rather than creating an illustrated timeline of his career as singer, lyricist, author, screenwriter and film composer, the film explores the process, and the necessity, of creativity.

Directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard drop Cave into a set of semi-fictional setups, such as a psychoanalytic session and a reunion with ex-Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld, and catch whatever sparks and truths fly from each encounter. The masterfully edited film delves deep into Cave’s conception of songwriting, and has the ring of truth even when we’re not certain of the subject’s own forthrightness.

We got Nick Cave to open up further on the topic of songs and their relationship to his own life. We were pleased to hear of his insistent desire to further develop his already-impressive resume as a film composer (which includes music for THE ROAD and THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD) with a turn scoring a horror film.

Q: It’s unusual for the subject of a documentary to be a co-writer on the film. Do you consider yourself primarily author or subject here?

A: You know, it was very much a collaborative thing with Iain and Jane, the directors. They put together a kind of, I don't know what you'd call it, not a mood reel. Anyway, they put together a thing very early on that described what the film would be like visually, and they kept pretty much to that. But they would contact me and ask me to write about particular sorts of things, like memory or the weather, or something like that. I would send aphoristic ramblings on to them and they would attach them to the film in some way. So we led each other in that respect.

After they edited the interview that I did with Darian Leader, the psychoanalyst, they found a lot of particular subjects coming up again and again. They also found that in my notebooks these particular subjects were coming up again and again. Memory and songwriting and these sorts of things. And so they I think they decided to focus the film on these particular aspects, which they then contacted me to write about with specific ideas. So, you know, it was a collaboration. They had the larger idea. They knew what was going on with the film. They knew what was needed. But they also knew that they needed my voice in there.

Q: Have you ever gone through psychoanalysis in your own life?

A: No, not in that way. I've been to endless therapists for one reason or another over the years, but nothing that was of any use or had the intensity of a psychoanalyst. Though, you know, one time many years ago I went and saw a Jungian psychoanalyst for about a month. Like four sessions and then I didn't continue it for some reason. But this was basically dream therapy. And I've found that very similar to the idea of songwriting in that it was really entering into the imagination and had little to do, really, with personal well-being. So in that respect it was quite similar. But, you know, is songwriting therapy? I don't think so.

It's healthy for people to explore their imaginations and to have an opportunity to do that. And much of the world doesn't allow for this. And so the way that I write songs, which is dealing with the imagination on a daily basis, I think keeps me from falling off the edge.

Q: You have some deeply romantic songs; I’m thinking of some of the tunes on THE BOATMAN'S CALL. Do romantic songs express ambition, or are they reflective of actual experience?

A: My take on it is that, having looked back to see

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how my life was at the times of writing those songs, it's very often at polar opposites. I think that I'm writing what I need rather than what I have, if you understand. So when I was writing THE BOATMAN'S CALL, things were in quite a dark place, for many different reasons. Out of that came a record that's got a lot of levity and beauty about it. That's by no means reflective of where I was at the time. And, you know, the songs that I write these days are very strange, very fractured sorts of songs, whereas my life is quite solid. So I think songwriting is about what I need rather than what I have.

Q: Do you find your life responding to songs? Is there a process of oscillation back and forth, where you achieve what you need, and then you need the thing you had before that?

A: Yeah, there's always been the feeling that the songs are a little bit more savvy than I am. You know, sort of prophetic, there's a prophetic nature to them sometimes. My wife Susie's very superstitious about them. She’s wary of me writing about certain things in our relationship that may not be true, but that can kind of conjure the demons into the relationship. (Laughs)

Q: Is there an aspect of danger to songwriting?

A: Well there's an aspect of danger to the imagination, I think. And, you know, it depends how you work with it.

Q: Was there a point when you found yourself being conscious of building a large narrative structure through your songwriting, almost like writing a novel in fragments?

A: I mean, I had [thought that] for a long time. It's

been a way to contextualize my songs and the melodramatic nature of a lot of my songs. Which, on their own, listeners get quite squeamish about. A lot of people just don't like that kind of thing. And they feel that it's not real or it's not subtle or whatever. Personally, I think within the context of the other songs, it feels like it's a kind of a world. And it's a world that does have its own logic and own heartbeat. And that makes a kind of sense, and is extremely personal. It may be theatrical in a way, but I feel more and more so that what I write is about the mundane than about doom. I write about ordinary things and of universal things. But, as I say in the film, they're kind of put through the mill of the imagination and turned into something epic. And that's just the way I write. I write narrative songs. And so they're stories. And stories generally epic in nature.

Q: In the film you reference being in the bright spotlight with Kylie Minogue as “a very special time.” Have you been hungry for that sort of greater fame?

A: I haven't been hungry for it. You know, it's always good to find that your records sell more than your last record. And not just financially but the fact that you're on the ascendant in some way rather than the decline. That's always been very slow for us, but it's always been the case. Things are always getting better with the Bad Seeds. I don't know why that is. Or is always seems like things are getting better for the Bad Seeds. But we can look at our last record and compare it to the record before, and it sold more copies. And it sold more copies in a world where the bottom's falling out of the market and all that. So we can feel good about the fact that things still feel strong. Mostly because that kind of decline that

people get into, inevitably I think, has a disastrous effect on confidence and therefore songwriting. There's nothing worse than that kind of desperation that gets behind certain songwriters. You can feel it where they're just chasing something, rather than following their own vision about things. So I'm always happy that we're doing well. But it's not that I would enjoy the idea of having paparazzi sit on my wall outside my house.

Q: How different is writing narrative songs and composing for film?

A: It's a totally different thing. I mean, one's about lyrics and one isn't. And writing lyrics is something that I do on my own. No matter how much I would like it to be different, it's on my own and there's nothing anyone can do to help me with that. I don't have anyone that I can lean on really, or send lyrics to where I feel that they could offer anything. [That’s] in the sense that what I'm working with at the particular time is completely personal. And very often it’s kind of new to me. So it's something that I do on my own.

And writing film score music is just an absolute pleasure, because it doesn't have anything to do with lyrics. I do it with Warren Ellis, who's an absolute genius in the studio with that kind of thing. So to do a film score is one of the most enjoyable parts of all of this that I can think of. And if there's anybody out there who wants us to do any film score work, we're always happy. We're looking for a horror film.

Q: Have you ever written horror, either as a script or in that sort of instrumental music?

A: No, we've sort of been slotted into kind of haunting and melancholy sorts of movies. And what we really wanna do is something that's violent and in your face.

Q: Having stated that outright, I believe people will come to you.

A: Yes, we're throwing that out to the universe.

Q: Can you describe your vision of Warren? He’s become your most constant collaborator.

A: The thing about Warren is, he’s eternally optimistic. And he's always full of ideas, always inspired — that's the word. It's an absolute pleasure to work with him. I don't think I've ever seen anything in his personal life get in the way of what he does professionally, in the sense that it doesn't matter what's going on with him, once he gets in the studio, he's Warren Ellis. And which is incredibly exciting to be around, an incredibly exciting force to be around.

Q: Before the Bad Seeds, Warren had (and still has) his band The Dirty Three. You’ve performed with them occasionally. Is there any chance of a record that could be billed as “The Dirty Three with Nick Cave”?

A: You know, I often think that the Dirty Three could do with a singer. (laughs) Just in terms of the development of a band over the years. Warren's a great singer and I've often tried to push Warren to sing. But it's just that he's not prepared to go there with that band. I think he could just do that really well. But he has problems lyric writing and all of that sort of stuff. He's a really good singer, got a great voice. (laughs) It would be quite nice for the Dirty Three to put out an album that had vocals on it, and not merely guest vocals.

Q: Despite your enthusiasm for composing for the screen, you’ve made comments suggesting your interest in screenwriting has waned.

A: Yeah. I'm just a bit more clued into what is involved in screenwriting. And, you know, I do do it and then I think why am I doing this? Initially there was a time when I didn't know anything about it. You know, with THE PROPOSITION for example. And it was sort of a thrill ride, the whole thing making that film. But with a lot of these sort of things you start to understand what's actually involved and the whole thing loses its sheen. You know, I don't know. I mean, I'm not saying I'm not gonna write another one. I'm just…

Q: You were reported to have written a draft of THE CROW. [In 2010, for producer Ed Pressman and director Stephen Norrington.]

A: Is that what they said?

Q: Yeah.

A: I think I did back then. Yeah, I did a little script doctoring.

Q: That seemed like a curious combination. Can you describe that script?

A: Not really. There was a time back then when I did a kind of bit of anonymous work in that respect. Yeah, you know, I don't know.

Q: Can you name other films you doctored during that period?

A: No. 6

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BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH. / SEPTEMBER 2014

When The Mafia Wanted To Whack THE GODFATHER

You may have heard the stories about the studio battles behind the making of THE GODFATHER. You may have heard that Paramount didn’t want to adapt Mario Puzo’s book because they believed mafia films didn’t do well at the box office, but producer Robert Evans believed that if he got an Italian director and Italian stars he could change that. You may have heard there were battles before production - the studio wanted Robert Redford for Michael Corleone, Danny Thomas for Vito Corleone, Warren Beatty was offered the directorial reigns and Francis Ford Coppola turned the picture down initially -- but the

strangest battle was one you may not have heard about. It was a battle with a group known as the Italian-American Civil Rights League.

Joseph Colombo formed the group (originally called the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League) in 1970 to protest what he thought was racially-motivated targeting of Italian Americans by the feds. He said that he and his family had been harassed by the FBI, and Colombo and a few friends staged a protest march outside the New York City FBI headquarters.What makes this unusual is that Joe Colombo was

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the head of one of New York’s Five Families. He was born into the life, his own father a Mafia soldier, and in 1963 he ended what became known as the First Colombo War by betraying Joseph Bonanno, who had a ballsy plan to off the heads of the Mafia Commission (the governing body of the Five Families). To repay him for this service, the Commission gave Colombo what was left of the Profaci crime family (Profaci was a Sicilian-born gangster who had an olive oil export business in New York who died of natural causes, but that was about the closest he comes to being a Vito Corleone stand-in).

So here’s Joe Colombo, one of the five most powerful mob bosses in the country complaining about unfair harassment by the FBI. Staging protests, even. In fact he gets 150,000 people to come out to Columbus Circle in June of 1970. And to be honest, he has something of a point; for much of the 19th and 20th centuries Italians were subjected to extreme prejudice and racism. Southern Italians, with their darker skin and predilection towards anarchy, are especially hated by the white people of America. By the ‘60s these attitudes were changing, but slowly, and Italians were still mostly portrayed as crooks or greaseballs in popular entertainment.

One of the things Colombo’s group wanted to do was stamp out the word Mafia (there’s obviously a self-serving component to that demand), so when he learned that Paramount was adapting THE GODFATHER -- original title THE MAFIA -- he began taking action. Being Joseph Colombo, this action included following producer Al Ruddy’s car and leaving threatening notes, as well as making threatening phone calls to producer Robert Evans.

Pressure was coming from all sides. Coppola wanted to shoot the film in the New York City neighborhoods run by the mob, and the Teamsters took their orders from the Five Families. On top of that, Paramount president Charlie Bludhorn was a man who had some friends in high, but shady places*.

So Al Ruddy took a meeting with Joseph Colombo. They got together at the Park Sheraton Hotel, famous in mob circles as the hotel’s barbershop was the site of the infamous assassination of boss Albert Anastasia. After a couple of meets Ruddy and Colombo came to an agreement -- the one use of the word Mafia in the script, originally when Jack Woltz yells at Tom Hagen “I don't care how many dago guinea wop Mafia greaseball goombahs come out of the woodwork!,” would be stricken -- and Colombo embraced the production with open arms. With such open arms that it made the front page of the newspapers, an embarrassment that briefly led to Ruddy being fired from the production.

The mob stayed involved in THE GODFATHER, elbowing their way into casting and showing up at

Marlon Brando’s trailer to swap stories, but Joseph Colombo would never see the film released. In 1971 he held another rally in Columbus Circle, but this one didn’t go as planned.

The Five Families had grown tired of Colombo’s grandstanding. While they operated quietly, Colombo craved the limelight and made himself available for TV interviews. People were told to stay away from the 1971 rally; Al Ruddy was actually supposed to be there, but he was warned off.

A black man named Jerome Johnson, posing as a photographer, came out of the crowd and shot Colombo three times in the head. Colombo’s guards shot Johnson dead on the spot and the mob boss was rushed to the hospital. He survived his injuries, but was completely paralyzed. He could move a couple of fingers and seemed responsive to some words, but was otherwise trapped inside himself for seven years until he died of cardiac arrest. It was widely believed that “Crazy” Joey Gallo, who had been in prison when the 1963 peace was brokered and thus didn’t consider himself subject to its terms, was behind the hit. Gallo would be spectacularly whacked while having dinner with his family, and the Second Colombo War raged until 1968.

In a truth is stranger than fiction moment, THE GODFATHER was shooting only a few blocks away when Colombo got hit. The scene? Michael ordering hits on the heads of the Five Families. The day after Colombo was shot, the crew filmed Clemenza shotgun-blasting an elevator full of wise guys.

Ironically, THE GODFATHER would become the basis of a new breed of gangsters who were inspired by the fiction. Talking to VANITY FAIR in 2009, James Caan says that he improvised the line “What do you think this is, the army, where you shoot ’em a mile away? You gotta get up close, like this -- and bada-bing! You blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.” Bada-bing, of course, became such a mobster term that Tony Soprano named his strip club after it. “It just came out of my mouth -- I don’t know from where,” Caan says.

Not everybody was so happy when the film opened in 1972. In Kansas City Thomas Gilade and Carl

"Red" Privitera of the Italian-American Unification Council of Greater Kansas City felt that the movie was harmful. So harmful, according to Kansas City Pitch, that they spent their own money buying every ticket to the premiere showing of THE GODFATHER at the Empire Theater. In Kansas City the Corleone saga played to an empty theater that first night.

* One of Bludhorn’s associates was Michele Sindona, who was a mob banker involved in the Vatican Bank scandal that would inform THE GODFATHER PART III. Sindona was poisoned while in prison. 6

NIHILISM MASSACRE! Eight Movies That Prove Why War veterans Can Never Go Home Again JOSEPH A. ZIEMBAAlamo Drafthouse Art Director and Programmer

@JosephAZiemba Read more at badassdigest.com

ZACk CARLSONExplosives Coordination, Fantastic Fest

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ODDO (Nick Millard, 1967)Pornographer-turned-shot-on-video-horror-maniac Nick Millard (SEX WEIRDO, DOCTOR BLOODBATH) channels Jean-Luc Godard in this stream-of-consciousness rant on the psychological ramifications of returning home from Vietnam. In this case, that means beating the shit out of hippies, murdering a lesbian step-mother, and receiving a topless shoe-shine. Also, lots of sexual encounters that are actually just women stripping and rubbing up against people, shoes or mirrors. Towards the middle of the movie, the protagonist carves something on a tree. It says: "I HATE YOU." (JZ)

WELCOME HOME, SOLDIER BOYS (Richard Compton, 1971)A grim, grim, GRIM exploration of the emotional and moral detachment experienced by veterans returning from Vietnam. Big boy Joe Don Baker and the skinny-assed Paul Koslo (MR. MAJESTYK; FREEBIE AND THE BEAN) are among a group of emotionally disabled all-Americans set loose on the open road with zero faith left in God, country and the future of mankind. Their search for who-knows-what leads them to one of the most sadistically hopeless screen finales in history. I should probably make some kind of good-natured joke to lighten the mood, but I think I'll just go kill myself instead. PS: None of you guys can have any of my stuff. (ZC)

MY FRIENDS NEED kILLING (Paul Leder, 1976)This friend needs hugging. Guilt, sexual grief and a therapist in a safari shirt greet Greg Mullavey (MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN) when he returns home from Vietnam. Naturally, Greg embarks on a weekend rape 'n' mutilation spree that targets his ex-platooners because he needs to "make them pay for what we've done." This is the only Vietnam-vet-on-a-rampage movie that uses overblown 1970s orchestral library music to punctuate a hanging. It is not disturbing. (JZ)

THE BOUNTY HUNTERS aka REvENGE OF THE MERCENARIES (Bruno Pischiutta, 1985)The first thing we see after this movie's opening title card is a message that says: "MIAMI: TEN YEAR LATER." Then we see two Vietnam veterans having dual three-way sex in separate hotel rooms. Hired as bounty hunters, the vets are soon tasked with capturing a deranged S&M killer who dabbles in black mass sacrifices, machete murders and heroin. Some women talk in a hair salon. There are aerobics classes with no music playing. This sixty-minute black hole of shot-on-video madness feels like a porno without the porn. It also feels like it was made in Canada because it was. (JZ)

THOU SHALT NOT kILL . . . EXCEPT (Josh Becker, 1985)Sam Raimi (yep . . . THAT Sam Raimi) stars as a Christ-crazed hippie cult leader whose ragged crew of flower-powered motorcycle manimals terrorize a small Southern town. Just when it seems no one can stop them, a physically disabled Vietnam vet bands his combat buddies together for a 3000-caliber assault that leaves the backwoods littered with splattery corpses. This film was made for a modest $200,000, of which $192,000 was clearly spent on fake blood. As if that's not enough, this cinematic love letter to genocidal rampages was co-written by Bruce Campbell (yep . . . THAT Bruce Campbell). If footage of the Kent State riots makes your nipples hard, this unseen masterpiece will get you straight pregnant. (ZC)

vICTIMS! (Jeff Hathcock, 1985)Last time I checked, it wasn't possible to have sexual intercourse through a pair of jeans. I was wrong! In this no-budget, idiotic cesspool, two Vietnam vets wearing short-shorts and XL tube socks terrorize a group of thirty-year-old girls on a field trip for geology class. This movie might have been distressing if it weren’t for the Steve Martin impressions, sweet dune buggy jumps, unrelated gore murders on rainbow bed sheets and dry-humping-through-the-jeans. And as for the bad guys? One falls off of a cliff and the other gets his penis cut off. As if you didn’t know. (JZ)

TRAMPA INFERNAL (Pedro Galindo III, 1989)A Vietnam vet named Jesse emerges from a cave. As legend has it, he’s still at war . . . with everybody! This includes a group of paintball gun-wielding teenagers who are hunting bears in the woods. The teens give each other lo-fives, play paddleball, make fat jokes and have problems setting up tents. Jesse sports a plastic mannequin mask and wig. He fights his war against the teens with grenades, tear gas and a machine gun. And a Freddy Krueger glove. This slasher was made in Mexico. (JZ)

kILLERS EDGE (Joseph Merhi, 1990)Wings Hauser was in Vietnam. Robert Z'Dar was in Vietnam. When Wings Hauser and Robert Z'Dar return to America after Vietnam, they become bitter enemies due to a drug war. Eventually, Wings Hauser fights Robert Z'Dar in an ultimate battle of destruction. In case you didn't catch that, WINGS HAUSER FIGHTS ROBERT Z'DAR IN AN ULTIMATE BATTLE OF DESTRUCTION!! Plus, Wings eats waffles and Z'Dar wears a bathrobe. Unmissable. (JZ) 6

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Nick Cave In The Movies

Nick Cave's lyrics and music are profoundly cinematic, conjuring striking visual imagery and drawing listeners into densely plotted tales of the dark side of life and the basest of human urges. His songs are populated with broken-hearted lovers, madmen and murderers doing God's work and arguing moral issues as justification. Take for instance “The Mercy Seat,” a fire and brimstone first-person narrative of a man sentenced to die on the electric chair for a crime he may or may not have committed. Then there's

“Tupelo” -- not just a riff on John Lee Hooker's song of the same name but a pounding, surrealistic invocation of the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and the prophetic birth of the King, Elvis Presley, and his stillborn twin brother. The Southern Gothic yarn

“The Hammer Song” finds Cave’s narrator tormented by visions and guilt in the wilderness trying to outrun an inevitable fate, and the Kurt Weill-esque grotesquerie “The Carny” is a Ray Bradbury story by way of Hieronymus Bosch with its menagerie of freaks, torrential rains and dead horses.

“As far back as I can remember, there was something that thrilled me about telling a story, and it’s absolutely the way I think, and when I sit down and try and write a song, I think in a narrative way." It's Cave's ability to tell a magnificent and engrossing story that has consistently led him to pursue avenues of expression beyond music all throughout his career. From his 1989 novel AND THE ASS SAW THE ANGEL, a Faulknerian tale of incest and murder, to a script for an unproduced sequel to the film GLADIATOR in which the spirit of Russell Crowe's deceased warrior Maximus is sent back to Earth by Roman deities to kill Jesus Christ, his extra-curricular work has been as richly rewarding as the best of his music. (Or at least completely original. That GLADIATOR 2 script went by the unmarketable name CHRIST-KILLER and involved the gladiator somehow becoming the avatar of battle, travelling through time to take part in all the wars of history up through Vietnam and ended in a scene in the men's bathroom at the Pentagon. Needless to say, he was

not asked to write a second draft.) Beginning with GHOSTS... OF THE CIVIL DEAD in 1988, Cave has worked with filmmaker John Hillcoat to bring a number of remarkable films to the screen.

Cave met Hillcoat in Melbourne in the late ‘70s. At the time, Cave was still with his first band, the feral post-punk Birthday Party whose music sounded like an unholy collision of blues, punk and free jazz fueled by the nastiest variant of bathtub speed cut with cheap scouring powder. The two bonded over music, literature and drugs and soon Hillcoat was directing the video for the Birthday Party's song “Nick The Stripper.” A few years later Hillcoat was attempting to make a film of the prison memoir IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST by Jack Abbott which eventually transformed into the fictionalized GHOSTS. He got Cave to appear in a small role as a deranged, animalisitic psychopath, an embodiment of pure rage, wretched and howling, not too far afield from Cave's early stage persona. The project also provided Cave his first opportunity to compose a film score, an ethereal mix of tin flute and floating female voice that showed the influence of his years in Europe playing in The Bad Seeds with Blixa Bargeld, Germany's post-punk muse and driving force behind power-tool wielding industrial legends Einstürzende Neubauten.

Cave's cinematic credentials began to grow thanks to a featured musical performance in Wim Wenders' film WINGS OF DESIRE, about a lonesome angel falling in love with a mortal in dreary East Berlin. He contributed music to the incredible Australian teen punk film DOGS IN SPACE and appeared opposite Brad Pitt in Tom DiCillo's quirky rock-n-roll comedy JOHNNY SUEDE. He provided the score to John Hillcoat's next film TO HAVE & TO HOLD, the story of an obsessive relationship set in the jungles of New Guinea, and planned to work with Hillcoat on an adaption of Michael Ondaatje's THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID - though the sudden success of Ondaatje's THE ENGLISH PATIENT put the source material out

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their reach. They never made a Billy the Kid film but the idea of making a western had taken root and four or five years later their greatest collaboration, THE PROPOSITION, was born.

A gritty, weather-beaten "western" set in the barely settled Australian outback of the 1880s, THE PROPOSITION brings together an extraordinary cast to play out a revenge tragedy replete with all the primal themes, striking intensity and poetic lyricism that define Cave's work. A family has been horrifically butchered by the escaped outlaw Arthur Burns (an astonishing Danny Huston), most likely assisted by his captured brothers Charlie (Guy Pearce) and Mikey (Richard Wilson). Burnt-out Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), the closest thing to law in their small frontier town, presents Charlie with a proposition: find and kill Arthur within nine days, winning a pardon for yourself and young Mikey, or we hang Mikey on Christmas Day. THE PROPOSITION recalls the first years of the Australian cinema renaissance -- what David Stratton called "The Last New Wave" -- where "the tension between a hostile landscape and a country in search of a civilised identity, between freedom and compromise, forged a new mythic structure."

"The Australian Western," says Hillcoat, "has several similarities to the American Western. In fact, the Australian bushranger films predate the American Western: the first feature film ever made in Australia was The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906. They have a primeval conflict between good and evil, with human nature pitted against itself as if on a blank slate. The bushrangers were outlaws who went into all the remote areas: outback Australia was a final frontier full of people trying to escape their past, very extreme and harsh and brutal. The clash was between the outlaw Irish-convict generation, represented by the brothers, and the British, with the aboriginals in conflict with both of them - three ways, like a triangle."

"I don't think we see things so much in black and white, or good guys and bad guys, or villains and heroes," says Cave. "We have a much more conflicting, ambiguous shame-faced view of our history. I think we basically see it as a history of failure and incompetence."

"There are certain aspects to our history that we wanted to include, but without getting bogged down," says Hillcoat, who spent years researching the complex relationship between the aboriginal population and the two groups of settlers. The final film could certainly have benefited from even more engagement with the aboriginal experience and more screen time for its black characters, but its portrayal of native anger and resistance is still one of its many strengths.It's the weighty Biblical and Conradian influences, characteristic of Cave, that, if anything, could have

bogged the film down. And yet remarkably they don't. Cave brings all his great gothic gloom to bear on the project but it's tempered by a deep care given to the emotional realities of the characters and nuances of their relationships. The deep field of acting talent elevates the material to beautiful heights.

Cave's score, composed with long-time collaborator and Bad Seed Warren Ellis, is a wonder of low strumming guitars and melancholic violins expressing the shifting moods of the dramatic Australian landscape across whose dreamlike expanses the film plays out. Trees moan, rivers refuse to run, the sun melts the ground and clouds cry. The film first came to him as music, Cave has said, before he was able to work it out into words. This origin shows strongly in every bit of the score, each passage powerfully expressing a strong relationship to the narrative elements of the film.

Cave has since gone on to write the achingly beautiful score to Andrew Dominik's severely underappreciated THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. He began work on another script for John Hillcoat about the seedy underbelly of life experienced by a British travelling salesman, partly inspired by Valerie Solanas' gleefully misandrist SCUM manifesto, which ultimately became his second novel THE DEATH OF BUNNY MONRO. And he scored Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD before penning an adaptation of the backwoods-GOODFELLAS-bootlegging-true-crime-epic THE WETTEST COUNTY IN THE WORLD, which Hillcoat eventually brought to the screen under the title LAWLESS.

All of these works capture Cave's distinctive, captivating voice and though he now finds himself an in-demand screenwriter, Cave says it reenergizes him for his "bread and butter" occupation. "Screenwriting is something I use to help keep the process of songwriting alive," he says. "If that's all I was doing, I would have dried up or gone into a real decline years ago with songwriting. I'm always coming back to songwriting. In fact, I'm always running back to songwriting screaming." 6

BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH. / SEPTEMBER 2014

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Talkie Terror: The Transition From Silent Film To SoundDEvIN FARACIBadass Digest Editor in Chief

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@devincf

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“I hope to Christ it was the sound stages!”

That is supposedly what It Girl Clara Bow cried out when she heard about a major fire on the Paramount lot in 1929. Her exasperated quote sums up the reaction many silent film stars had to the encroaching threat of the talkies. That transition shook Hollywood to the core, led to an outbreak of what the gossip magazines called “Talkie Terror” and gave us the basic drama that serves as the backdrop of the immortal classic SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, but how many stars were truly ruined by the arrival of microphones on studio lots? As is so often the case, reality is far more nuanced than the myth, which has dozens of actors suddenly unemployable overnight, their squeaky voices or Brooklyn accents rendering them obsolete.

The talkies were a long time coming. Thomas Edison always intended to marry images to sound, and as far back as 1885 was trying to get his phonograph and his kinetoscope to work together. That was one of the big problems keeping sound out of film -- synchronization. Beyond that there was a problem modern audiences wouldn’t even consider; while projecting onto a screen enabled an entire theater to watch the movie, pre-electric amplification just couldn’t make the sound loud enough.

THE JAZZ SINGER was famously the film that changed Hollywood, but that change didn’t come overnight. And THE JAZZ SINGER wasn’t even technically the first ‘sound’ movie; Warner Bros had released their first feature length Vitaphone film, DON JUAN, the year before. DON JUAN had music

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and sound effects on its soundtrack (at the time a phonograph), but no dialogue. THE JAZZ SINGER broke that barrier… and then it took six years for everybody else to really catch up. Studios were still releasing silent films into the ‘30s, and they would often release silent and talkie versions of their movies side by side. The reality for the studios is that not every theater in the country was wired for sound, and the upgrade process took a while.

But by 1929, when Clara Bow prayed for the destruction of Paramount’s new soundstages (and she was right, by the way, it was a stage for sound that was burning), the writing was on the wall. And not every actor who had prospered in the silents would make it through the transition. The reasons were varied, though.

Many actors with foreign accents found their fortunes changed. In the silent era no one knew that a cowboy actually spoke with a thick German accent, but once the movies started talking opportunities for actors like Reginald Denny changed. Denny’s career was based on playing corn-fed American boys, something the British actor found harder to do when he was required to speak. The microphone was, in many ways, their enemy.

But for other actors the talkies were simply the nudge out the door they needed. Mary Pickford had been in the business thirty years, and her transition was so successful she won an Oscar for her first talking role, but she soon retired. Lillian Gish made some moderately successful talkies but decided that she’d rather work in the theater. Later she had an acclaimed television career.

For these older actors the problem wasn’t that their voices were squeaky or accents were wrong but that the entire medium had changed. The way they worked had to be totally rethought; in silent films the director would be shouting directions, but in the talkie era sets needed to whisper quiet. The technical issues that came with early sound recording -- wonderfully lampooned in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN -- meant that physical actors like Fairbanks had to adjust to a stiff, motionless style. Everybody needed to be talking right into a hidden microphone, which meant the pictures were barely motion anymore.

More than all that, the aesthetics of motion picture acting changed. Performers who could tell audiences so much with their eyes were forced to adjust to a new world where they couldn’t play as big, couldn’t be as expressive. These older actors had a way of working, and that way of working slowly disappeared.

Other actors, like Wallace Beery, found themselves the victims of sound as an excuse. Studios used the new talkies as a reason to cut actors from contracts or to

sideline them. There were tons of new acts -- anarchic verbal talents like the Marx Brothers and singers like Ethel Merman -- ready to take advantage of sound, and the studios wanted to get rid of the (perfectly serviceable) expensive stars. Some, like Beery, would make comebacks in the years to come, refusing to be held back by talkies.

If there was an actor whose career was legitimately, definitely destroyed by the talkies it’s probably Raymond Griffith. The name today is all but meaningless, but he was one of the biggest comedians of the silent film era. Griffith made only one talkie appearance, and sound ended his career. Griffith had, as a boy, suffered an injury to his throat -- either from an illness or from too many nights shouting on stage

-- and could only speak at the level of a hoarse whisper. In the silents his ragged voice was hidden, but that microphone demanded more than Griffiths could give. He eventually went behind the scenes and co-founded 20th Century Fox. If his throat ended his career it also ended his life -- Griffiths choked to death at The Masquers Club, a social club for actors.

As for Clara Bow, who wished destruction on the soundstage? Her career kept chugging along in talkies; she remained a top draw at the box office, talking and singing in her Brooklyn accent. Audiences liked it, but she wasn’t happy. "I hate talkies," she told MOTION PICTURE CLASSIC magazine in 1930; "they're stiff and limiting. You lose a lot of your cuteness, because there's no chance for action, and action is the most important thing to me. [But] I can't buck progress. I have to do the best I can." 6

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JEREMY SMITHAin’t It Cool News Contributor

@mrbeaks

In the summer of 1975, an Italian-American horror flick called BEYOND THE DOOR slipped into U.S. theaters and rang up a tidy $15 million at the box office. The film centered on a pregnant woman’s grisly struggle with demonic possession, the kind that induces projectile vomiting and literally makes one’s head spin in circles -- i.e. the kind William Friedkin depicted two years prior in the massively successful THE EXORCIST. These similarities were not lost on THE EXORCIST’s producer-distributor, Warner Bros.; given that the studio had a sequel to Friedkin’s blockbuster gearing up for production, they weren’t exactly pleased to find a low-rent knock-off satiating moviegoers’ hunger for their specific style of demonic possession two years in advance. So they sued.

The lawsuit was filed against Film Ventures International, an upstart distribution company located in Atlanta, Georgia, that was owned and operated by entrepreneur/filmmaker Edward L. Montoro. The company owed its existence to the runaway regional success of Montoro’s soft-core porn comedy GETTING INTO HEAVEN, which grossed twenty times its production budget in 1968. FVI’s early business model was built around the distribution of Italian Spaghetti Westerns and horror films, but Montoro was eager to finance his own productions -- a dream that would surely be dashed if Warner Bros. convinced a U.S. court to file an injunction against BEYOND THE DOOR.

The lawsuit ultimately failed when a judge determined there were not enough similarities between THE EXORCIST and BEYOND THE DOOR to constitute plagiarism. So Montoro was free to produce FVI’s first major film the following year, a JAWS knock-off called GRIZZLY that would go on to gross $39 million at the domestic box office, thus making it the most successful independent movie of 1976. Montoro had suddenly transformed FVI into a legitimate production company, and he was so delighted with Grizzly’s windfall that he decided to cut the director and screenwriters completely out of the profits. This prompted another lawsuit, one that Montoro did not win.

Despite Montoro’s highly questionable business practices, FVI was fast turning into one of the most successful film distribution companies in America. Their brand was exploitation (particularly horror and martial arts flicks), but if the company had a signature type of film, it was the animals-run-amok subgenre; GRIZZLY was the company’s biggest hit, and the goofy eco-horror throwdown DAY OF THE ANIMALS wasn’t far behind. But Montoro was hunting bigger game. He wanted to hook the most feared/profitable cinematic beast of them all: the great white shark.

Ever monitoring the international marketplace for exploitable trash, Montoro finally found his man-eater in Enzo G. Castellari’s 1981 smash L’ULTIMO SQUALO. Castellari’s film was doing tremendous business abroad under a variety of titles, most of which brazenly promoted the picture as a quasi-sequel to Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (in Japan, the film was called JAWS RETURNS). And this was fair because L’ULTIMO SQUALO was essentially a quasi-remake of Spielberg’s classic with bits from the sequel, JAWS 2, added in.

Working from a story by producer Ugo Tucci, screenwriter Mark Princi reshuffles characters, events and motivations from the 1975 blockbuster while adding an extra dollop of media cynicism. James Franciscus stars as Peter Benton, an author whose name is so close to that of JAWS novelist Peter Benchley that it feels more like homage than theft. Unfortunately, the rest of the film isn’t that affectionate in its reapplication of tropes and themes. Benton is called into action when a windsurfing friend of his teenage daughter goes missing in the ocean. When a chomped-off section of the young man’s board is discovered by a cantankerous shark hunter named Ron Hamer (Vic Morrow playing

Robert Shaw playing Quint in JAWS), Benton pleads with Mayor William Wells (Joshua Sinclair) to close the beaches and cancel the upcoming regatta. Knowing a cancelled regatta would destroy his ongoing gubernatorial campaign (seriously, no one’s been this maniacal

GREAT WHITE, The Great JAWS Rip-Off

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about a regatta since Richard Crenna in SUMMER RENTAL), Wells denies Benton’s request -- but, unlike Murray Hamilton’s cheerfully negligent mayor in JAWS, Wells does rim the beach area where the windsurfing competition will be held with shark-proof netting. No maneater that’s extremely rare for these waters is going to postpone a regatta in William Wells’s town.

But when a gaggle of attractive windsurfers opt for a slo-mo frolic in the water on the eve of the regatta, the thirty-foot great white shark gets worked up and pierces the steel netting, setting the stage for disaster the following day. Benton and Hamer predictably join forces to hunt down the killer beast, but Castellari does work one interesting variation on the JAWS formula by having Wells attempt to rescue his political career by capturing the shark on his own. And had Wells thought of something more sensible than a helicopter dangling a side of beef stuck on a giant fish hook over the open water, perhaps he would’ve been the hero of this tale (spoiler alert: the shark eats more than that side of beef ).

L’ULTIMO SQUALO is a lesser effort from the underappreciated Castellari (his SUPERB EAGLES OVER LONDON plays like the World War II film Brian De Palma never made), but his visual skill places the movie far above the Asylum-style knock-offs of today -- even in a complete piece of garbage, style counts. The creature effects team does what they can with limited resources, but their shark is only capable of breaching the surface headfirst and sort of benignly bobbing along in the water.

After a profitable international run, Montoro bought the U.S. distribution rights to L’ULTIMO SQUALO, rechristened it GREAT WHITE and sunk $4 million into advertising its March 1982 theatrical release. The film was an immediate hit, and was set to expand nationwide when Universal Pictures filed a lawsuit claiming Castellari’s picture plagiarized JAWS. Though Montoro had been through this before with BEYOND THE DOOR, and knew how difficult it was to prove copyright infringement, this time the similarities were too numerous to avoid an injunction. On April 22, 1982, a California district court decided in favor of Universal, and all prints of GREAT WHITE were removed from U.S. theaters.

This injunction wasn’t the coup de grâce that struck down Montoro and FVI, but a costly divorce settlement combined with the failure of John “Bud” Cardos’s 1984 horror film MUTANT drove the company into bankruptcy. Rather than fight to save FVI, Montoro pocketed $1 million from his failing company and vanished (possibly to Mexico). It was a clichéd end to a boldly unoriginal career. Neither he nor GREAT WHITE has officially been seen in the United States since. 6

Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett first worked together on the nasty horror film A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE. The two have teamed up again and again in the years since, and were responsible for some of the best segments in the anthology films V/H/S and V/H/S 2, as well as the cult classic home invasion movie YOU’RE NEXT. While horror has defined their collaboration so far, Adam and Simon have much more on their minds than just slashers in animal masks.

Their latest film, THE GUEST, is an action thriller that premiered at Sundance to rave reviews. Dan Stevens, DOWNTON ABBEY’s handsome Matthew Crawley, plays David, a vet who travels to visit the family of his fallen comrade. The family takes him in, but they don’t know the deadly secret David has brought home from war, and they could never guess just how explosively violent it will get from here.

Q: THE GUEST is an action thriller, but it also fitsinto the “Home From War” genre. What were some movies you looked at in that genre for guidance?

SB: It was more about looking at what those films didn’t do which, not to put too fine a point on it, was to be entertaining. I did see STOP-LOSS and IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH; recent post-Iraq films were very much on my mind. But it was more: how do you tell a story like this in a way people want to see and not be so politically on the nose with whatever statements you’re trying to make?

AW: That was the weird thing about the Iraq War; itbred all these movies that wanted to be the Important Statement Iraq War Film. But if you look at the Vietnam War there was a lot of really great movies that came from the Vietnam War, but

by and the large most of those are pretty over the top. APOCALYPSE NOW is one of the main ones that came out of that and it’s almost a fantasy story. DEER HUNTER - the Vietnam section in that film is just insane. The thing we wanted to avoid doing was make just another boring, self-serving, self-serious movie about the Iraq War and do more of our ROLLING THUNDER take on it.

SB: Not to mention that there’s nothing more annoying or condescending than someone talking about something they don’t personally know. Whether that’s the “#notallmen” Twitter hashtag thing or, in our case, I have friends who served in the Iraq war, but I didn’t. And I would be very careful about making some sort of thesis statement based on my understanding of it from reading a couple of ROLLING STONE articles. We’re about making fun, entertaining movies that approach things in a way we haven’t seen before. We want to be original but still work within genre parameters. I just think we wanted to use it as a starting point but then veer as much away from what those Iraq War-influenced films did. And I think Adam is right -- a lot of filmmakers were in a rush to make a statement about the Iraq War, but that statement basically was that the Iraq War was bad, and it was like if you didn’t already know that you wouldn’t go see the movie and be convinced of that. So who are you making the movie for? Who’s your audience? We always think about who our audience is and who we want to see our films -- which is of course every man, woman and child.

AW: The movie never actually says the words Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s purposefully vague.

Welcoming THE GUEST Home: A Q&A With Adam Wingard and Simon BarrettDEvIN FARACIBadass Digest Editor in Chief

Read more at badassdigest.com

@devincf

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SB: We intentionally wanted to avoid appearing as if we were making a statement about one conflict.

AW: The Iraq conflict is just one of many that is goingto keep going. It’s really more about the military-industrial complex than about one engagement. Our film is more about that underground corporate world that is interbred with the military. And then it’s about a bunch of fun and Christmas lights and decorations from HALLOWEEN III.

SB: We wanted to comment a bit about the military-industrial complex at large, but even in the original draft of the script the Dan Stevens character references both the Middle East and North Africa because we weren’t trying to make it specific to one thing.

Q: There are elements of this movie, especially the relationship David has with the family, that remind me of TERMINATOR 2. What influence did that film, and other films of the ‘80s and ‘90s, have on THE GUEST?

SB: I prefer the first TERMINATOR, but I would say in general we try to never do outright homages to anything. It never feels interesting to me; those guys, Friedberg and Seltzer who do the NOT

ANOTHER WHATEVER comedies, that’s just recognition comedy. You recognize a reference and therefore you feel clever and you laugh. Especially in the horror genre you see a lot of ‘80s homages and the audience likes it because they get what’s being referenced. “Isn’t it cute that the coroner is named Raimi?” Yeah, that’s cute, but I’d like to see you try a little bit harder and come up with something original. You can be influenced by Sam Raimi -- and we certainly are, almost to an obsessive extent -- but that doesn’t mean you should emulate what he did. You should try to figure out how to give someone else that feeling, to figure out how to innovate like he did in the day. I’d say we both watch a ton of movies, but I would never want to do something that didn’t feel original.

AW: Going into this project one of my main influences was THE TERMINATOR films and the HALLOWEEN movies. But, like Simon says, I never wanted to directly emulate that. I wanted to live in that same kind of stylistic universe that existed in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It wasn’t about copying those things, but it was about finding the tip-offs on these things I like. A lot of it boils down to tonal things, the way characters interact with each other. Then there’s obviously the music. Obviously

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THE TERMINATOR scores -- 1 and 2 -- were important, as was John Carpenter’s stuff.

I have a problem when people try to emulate music from the ‘80s and they’re just using a lot of software they’ve downloaded that has an ‘80s sound, but you can tell if it’s authentic or not. That’s why I hired composer Steve Moore of the soundtrack; all of the equipment he uses are retro sets, they’re all from the ‘70s and ‘80s. They’re all definitively of that time. He’s not trying to copy anybody or recreate any sounds, he just has those sounds. Now he can do whatever he wants with them. They’re going to be those sounds, but now they have a modern edge to them. That’s what I wanted to be doing with THE GUEST. We’re making a modern film, but it still has that ‘80s tone.

Q: Most people will know your lead, Dan Stevens, from the fluffy British soap DOWNTON ABBEY. What was it that made him right for this role?

AW: I talked to a lot of actors in that age range. Danwas one of the first people I talked to, and he just had the right kind of vibe I was looking for. He has a very calm, cool, intelligent attitude. I knew I wanted a semi-android feel to the character, and that he could play that without losing his humanity. It’s a fine line -- we wanted a robotic quality to him,

but we wanted you to have empathy for him, and for you to be conflicted as you root for him.

SB: Dan’s also funnier than people give him credit for. The way his DOWNTON ABBEY character is so likable because of the mini reactions he has to absurd things, that to me showed he had a good sense of humor and would get the tone we were going for.

AW: When we meet actors for the first time I like totell the story of how I got into the industry, which is basically making a movie about a character who is Robo-tripping all the time, and I was Robo-tripping the entire time we were making it. Seeing how they react to that is a good gauge, seeing if they get where I’m coming from.

Q: Speaking of Dan Stevens, there’s a scene where he comes out of the shower and he is impressively ripped, which DOWNTON fans found surprising.

SB: It was work. Dan did this movie A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES right before he did ours, and he lost a ton of weight for that. When I first met Dan he was emaciated. He was like Christian Bale in THE MACHINIST and we needed Christian Bale in BATMAN BEGINS.

AW: That was the only question going into it -- could we bulk Dan up in time for the show? When we cast him it was a month before shooting, and as soon as he was committed we sent him out to 8711.

SB: They trained THE MATRIX guys, the 300 guys.8711 is a big training facility out here for actors.

AW: They learn how to fight and how to use guns and stuff. But also Clayton Barber, the stunt coordinator, was his personal trainer. The scene where he comes out of the shower and you see his abs we saved for the end of the shoot so we could maximize his workout as we went. The day before -- which I had never heard of this -- the day before we shot the scene Dan wasn’t allowed to drink water for the 24 hours leading up to it.

SB: And we were shooting in New Mexico in July. It was the only time I saw him even slightly grouchy.

AW: He didn’t drink water until right before that scene. Then they gave him a Diet Coke or a Dr. Pepper and he downs it and then they got him to do a hundred push-ups. Apparently that makes your veins bulge out and your muscles tighten up, and then we shot the scene.

SB: I don’t know if any of that stuff actually had an effect. It might have just been a funny way to torture Dan. 6

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video vortex: DOCTOR BLOODBATH And The Anti-Human Legacy Of Nick Millard

Somebody had to bring abortions and slashers together. Thankfully, Nick Millard was the one to do it.

Nick Millard aka Nick Philips aka Your New Favorite Dissident is the most singular and beautifully deranged filmmaker that no one cares about. After dozens of 1960s/’70s soft-and-hardcore curiosities (ODDO, THE PLEASURES OF A WOMAN) and 1970s trash-horror revelations (SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING, CRIMINALLY INSANE), Millard bought a camcorder and produced a string of 1980s shot-on-video (SOV) movies. They have titles like DEATH NURSE, DEATH NURSE II and GUNBLAST. Few people understand Millard's work, let alone attempt to understand it.That’s one of the things that makes his movies so appealing. That, and the fact that none of these films exceeds 70 minutes. Like Daniel Johnston’s songs and Kenneth Patchen’s fiction, Millard’s aesthetics reject convention and the world at large, ensuring an anti-human experience that can't be found elsewhere. It's heavenly gratification through inexplicable irrationality. And it's never been more defined than DOCTOR BLOODBATH.

Successful filmmaking is about cutting away the mundane, focusing on specifics, and presenting a world that can be understood and digested in approximately 90 minutes. In THE GENERAL, we don’t see Buster Keaton clean his bathroom. We see him balance on

the edge of a careening locomotive with nothing but a timber for support. In FEMALE PRISONER SCORPION: BEAST STABLE, we don’t watch Meiko Kaji buy her iconic black trench coat. We watch her chop off a man’s arm to remove her handcuffs.

DOCTOR BLOODBATH, the final 1980s Nick Millard SOV horror film, does not work like this. It is preoccupied with the mundane. We see people looking at the ground, talking about rent money, and putting perfume on old boobs. This is not informed or successful filmmaking. However, we do learn that abortions are achieved by waving an ear-flushing kit in front of a vagina.

Gordon from DEATH NURSE and DEATH NURSE 2 runs a health clinic. The phone rings. An elderly nurse answers and says, “Why yes, we perform abortions here. Shall I put you down for 3 P.M.?” After each operation, Gordon shows up at the patient’s home, injects her with drugs and kills her. He uses a knife, a hammer, a screwdriver and a meat cleaver to do this. Between killings, Gordon drives his white sedan on the San Francisco streets. He also sits down at a desk or on a couch and stares into space while twiddling his thumbs or clenching his fists. Meanwhile, Gordon’s wife is having an affair with a poet, who is of unknown European descent. He doesn’t speak English very well, but has many lines. The wife looks to be in her mid-fifties. When the poet gets the wife pregnant, the wife says, “That dirty rotten no good Polack son of a bitch!” Then she turns to Gordon for help. This involves stabbing a plastic doll with a butcher knife, aka AN ABORTION.

Like all of Nick Millard’s films, DOCTOR BLOODBATH runs just over 60 minutes. And, like CRIMINALLY INSANE II and GUNBLAST, this movie is filled with shockingly terrible compositions, uncomfortable bouts of silence and rapid-fire edits of repeated footage. It has the same languid actors

@JosephAZiemba

JOSEPH A. ZIEMBAAlamo Drafthouse Art Director and Programmer

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playing the same languid roles, though with different character names. Elements are reused across all of his films so often (Gordon’s car, that cemetery footage from CRIMINALLY INSANE, the house from every Millard film spanning 1976-1988) that the blurring of boundaries between the movies becomes inevitable. The netherworld that Millard creates for his characters never changes. It just spreads, organically, in 60-minute increments. Still, DOCTOR BLOODBATH surpasses CRIMINALLY INSANE II and the DEATH NURSE films in terms of entertainment. It has a plot and introduces secondary characters. There’s less pillaging of footage from past Millard triumphs. Except when Gordon kills his maid. That scene is stitched together with a maid-killing scene from SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING, which would be fine except that the maids are not the same.

Very few people should be asked to sit through Millard’s SOV films. But DOCTOR BLOODBATH is different. The mundane elements are so opposite

of what we’re familiar with that everything we see becomes exhilarating. The film never spends too much time focusing on any one element. Plus, every single person who appears onscreen will make you gasp, barf or ask, “Is he/she OK?” This includes the bearded man who slowly waves his hands at us during the last three minutes of the film. We’ve never seen him before this happens. 6

DOCTOR BLOODBATH screens as part of Video Vortex in September at the Alamo Drafthouse.

To plunge further into the madness of SOV trash-horror, check out BLEEDING SKULL! A 1980s TRASH-HORROR ODYSSEY (Headpress, 2013), co-authored and designed by Joseph A. Ziemba. The book is available at BLEEDINGSKULL.COM.

BIRTH.MOVIES.DEATH. / SEPTEMBER 2014

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ADAN DE LA TORRE Slaughter Lane Manager

There’s a common misconception that breweries, bars and restaurants are dumb for celebrating Oktoberfest in September. The general public thinks that Oktoberfest came about because Germans just wanted another reason to party, but that’s only half true.

The celebration originated in 1810, when Bavarian King Maximilian I. Joseph organized a two day festival to celebrate his son’s wedding. The party that followed the union between Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen, what we now call Oktoberfest, was a sort of political manifestation to show national unity after the Napoleonic wars, when Bavaria was fighting alongside the French. Food and drink free for all were offered at several locations around Munich. The festival was so popular that it just kind of stuck with the community in Munich.

The length of the party got longer and longer until eventually it lasted two weeks! In 1870 it was moved to

the last two weeks of September since the weather was a little nicer than mid-October. The festival has been going strong for over 200 years, and has only missed a year here or there due to war or cholera.

There is a crazy assumption that the Oktoberfest, or marzen, style -- a lager that originated in Bavaria -- has dominated the festival since it originated all those years ago. This however, is not true. For the first few decades, the main style of beer served was a classic Bavarian Dunkel, a dark German lager. Why the change, you ask? No one really knows why, but the most popular story in most publications goes a little something like this. Bear with me; you are getting the “me” version of this. This guy Mike, owner of Spaten’s tent, ran out of his normal dark lager in 1872. Instead of grabbing beer from another brewery to pour at his tent, he decided to pour a strong version of a Vienna lager (marzenbier) that his son Gabe had made. It was a whopping 8% ABV and was sold for a higher price than the rest of the

Prost! On Marzenbier And Oktoberfest

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beers there. Since then the beer has changed juristically, down to the range of about 5.5%-6.5%.

Marzenbier, meaning “March beer” in German, is a style that came about by a sort of mini-prohibition decreed by Duke Albrecht V in 1553. There was to be no brewing between April 23rd and September 29th, because of bacteria that would often infect Bavarians’ beers and spoil them in the warmer months. As a result, brewers would work crazy hard to get as much beer made as possible, to last until Fall. The beer wouldn’t spoil because it was lagered (stored in a cool place for aging before use), and therefore wasn’t allowed to get too warm to be infected. No one really commercially brewed this style until the Spaten incident I talked about earlier. In 1872 Spaten was the first to use the name Oktoberfestbier for a marzen-style brew.

Since the ABV and gravity have changed so much over the century there are only a few real guidelines to classify a beer as an Oktoberfestbier. The beer must be made with primarily Munich Malt, a highly aromatic malt with a color rating of 12 to 25. This results in a deep golden amber color that has actually lightened up over the years just to meet general trends of modern tastes. Americans, however, have stayed pretty traditional in the use of Munich malt. The deep orange of a Sam Adams Octoberfest or Real Ale Oktoberfest is what most of us are used to seeing. But traditional Oktoberfestbiers from breweries like Spaten are a lot lighter in color. 6

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