If anyone embodies the rewards capitalism can bestow on eccentric or ridiculous behavior, it might just be Ted Giannoulas, famous to our nation’s sports fans as “The San Diego Chicken.” The Chicken started out as a mascot for the San Diego radio station with the curious call letters of KGB-FM—a student at San Diego State University, Giannoulas landed his first gig as the Chicken when he wore the outfit for a promotion to distribute Easter eggs to children at the San Diego Zoo.

By dint of being unusually enterprising and entertaining (he really is very good), the San Diego Chicken became something like a mascot for sports at large. He was never affiliated with the San Diego Padres or any other San Diego team as such—what relevance would a chicken have for a team named after monks?—but he did appear at 520 consecutive Padres games at one point. In the early 1980s, the Chicken was also a regular on the Johnny Bench-hosted children’s show The Baseball Bunch, which also featured manager Tommy Lasorda as a Merlin-esque character named “The Wizard.”

With all the devil-may-care verve of Ben Stein’s character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or any number of middle school film strips, narrator Rex Allen intones in “Chickenomics: A Fowl Approach To Economics” (groan) points out that the Chicken enjoyed “a unique career ... that can only happen in a market economy.” Allen explains that the Chicken shows us five key facets of a market economy: “Private ownership of resources, self interest motives, consumer sovereignty, markets, and competition.” Zzzzzz. Later on: “Now you know why, from millions of chickens, this one humorous bird can be successful in our economy—that is, until it lays an egg! Any chicken can do that!”

I’m telling you, not even the magical Chicken can make this stuff entertaining to high school kids.
 

 
However, the movie’s closing credits are scored to an unforgettable “boc boc” rendition of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” This preposterous and pun-laden educational movie demands to be seen.
 

 
via A/V Geeks

 
The 1968 French sexual revolution comedy Erotissimo is one of those ultra stylish Sixties films that art director types go totally nuts over. With good reason.

Starring Annie Giradot as a married woman confused by the rapid change in sexual mores around her. Erotissimo takes place precisely at the point in the 1960s where SEX became an inescapably “in your face” component of modern life, advertising and urban dwelling. As such, it is a perfect time capsule of the end of one era and the beginning of another. Giradot’s heroine struggles to understand the matters I presume would have been vexing a fair amount of the film’s audience during that time period as well.

But plot aside, the film’s reputation these days is due to its unique—and very Sixties—art direction: Gerard Pires’ Erotissimo looks like almost no other film I can think of. Nearly every frame is a masterpiece of visual composition, in the vein of William Klein’s Who Are You, Polly Magoo? The groovedelic soundtrack is the aural equivalent of a white molded plastic chair…
 


 
Mod Cinema sells a DVD of Erotissimo with English subtitles, making it possible for those of us who paid no attention in French class to enjoy this treat.

A married woman in her 30’s (Annie Girardot) tries to spice up her sex life with her distracted husband Philippe (Jean Yanne) under the deluge of sexy Swedish movies, sexy advertising on the streets, sexy intimate clothing in ladies’ shops, and even talks about sex and marital infidelity with her mother and female friends. Philippe, a general manager of a dynamic company specializing in baby products becomes preoccupied with an upcoming tax audit. Even the presence of a beautiful fashion model who lives with Annie’s brother fails to divert his attention. This amazing and colorful work of 60’s pop art features an original psychedelic soundtrack by French composer William Sheller & singer-songwriter Michel Polnareff, and don’t miss the cameo by monsieur Serge Gainsbourg!

Gainsbourg’s cameo is appropriately sleazy: He plays a guy who hits on Annie as she is leaving a Swedish “art film.”
 

 
Below, the NSFW Erotissimo trailer:
 

 
Did you get a load of Joe Namath in his fur coat at the Super Bowl? It reminded me of the days when he was a Super Bowl star himself. As every football fan knows, in early 1969 the underrated Jets were set to play the mighty Baltimore Colts in a matchup between the NFL and the upstart rival league, the AFL. The Packers of the older NFL had already won Super Bowls I and II. Namath, as quarterback for the Jets, “guaranteed” victory and then delivered on his promise, which did a great deal to legitimize the newer league. Only a year or so later, the NFL and the AFL would merge, and everyone would live happily ever after except for the dudes with the concussions. Given that Namath’s team was from New York, that one game would ensure that sports fans in the Big Apple would never, ever shut up about “Broadway Joe.” (The Jets haven’t won a title since, and the Jets fans consider themselves, with fairly good reason, as being one of the more put-upon fan bases in the league.)
 

 
In late 1970, Embassy Pictures released C.C. and Company, a biker movie starring none other than Joe Namath as “C.C. Ryder,” an affable moto-counterculture type who hangs out with his The character name was obviously inspired by “C.C. Rider,” the 1966 hit by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, a rollicking track that provides the soundtrack for the opening credits. 

C.C. and Company was produced by Allan Carr, who later produce the 1978 hit Grease as well as the 1980 Village People vehicle Can’t Stop the Music. In the movie, C.C. is hanging out cheerfully shoplifting from a clueless supermarket when he and a couple of his gang mates from “The Heads” come upon a beautiful fashion journalist named Ann whose limo has stalled in the desert. Instead of letting his buddies rape Ann, he intervenes and gets them to go away, which pisses them off as well as the leader of the gang, named “Moon,” who’s played with effective menace by William Smith. C.C. and Ann begin to fall for each other as C.C. tries to extricate himself from the Heads.
 

 
The movie’s got a jocular style—but all in all, it’s pretty crappy. But this tells you everything you need to know about that era: this wasn’t some obscure release—according to Variety, C.C. and Company was the #1 movie in America for two solid weeks in October 1970!

So my only question is, when does victorious Seattle Seahawks QB Russell Wilson start filming his biker flick? Shoot, I’d settle for some kind of Fast and Furious knockoff.
 

 
IMDB lists this hour-long session of Michael Caine teaching some students the art of film acting as being produced in 1987, but I have a hunch it was recorded a few years earlier. For one thing, aside from Alfie (1966), the acting exercises lean heavily on two movies that would have been very current in, say, 1984: Educating Rita and Deathtrap. Also, I think I remember seeing this on Bravo (yes, kids, there once was a time when Bravo had almost entirely highbrow, high-quality programming) earlier than 1987, although I could be wrong about that.

Noted non-actor Howard Stern has said of this documentary, “I watched the video and had my doubts ... I thought a lot of what he said was horseshit, but halfway through the movie I thought: The son of a bitch is right!”—so you know it has to be good. Howard Stern says so!

The appearance of this video on YouTube warmed my heart. It’s a pleasure to see such detailed evidence of Caine’s mastery of movie acting.

The most famous bit from this documentary is when Caine demonstrates a couple of key tips about closeups in the movies: “If I keep blinking, it weakens me. But if I’m talking to you, and I don’t blink, and I just keep going, and I don’t blink, and I keep on going, and I don’t blink, you start to listen to what I’m saying….” 
 

Michael Caine—not blinking….
 
Caine’s very charming and tells a number of illumating stories along the way. One of his memorable bits is a story about George Cukor telling Jack Lemmon that the best movie acting is simply doing “nothing.” It’s startling to see him explain a point by doing some lines from the scene we have just seen the student actors doing. No disrespect to them, but it’s quite amazing how different and how much better Caine’s versions are! And you can also see decided improvement in the students’ performances as the hour goes on. Unfortunately, I don’t recognize most of the young actors—two of them apparently became regulars on strictly-for-U.K.-audiences Coronation Street and EastEnders. I did recognize Celia Imrie from a few U.K. mysteries; I don’t remember her from Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace but I congratulate her on landing such a lucrative gig.

This video is available on Amazon as a standalone DVD or as part of a six-DVD product called BBC Acting Set. The other five classes (also available as individual DVDs) are Simon Callow’s Acting in Restoration Comedy, Janet Suzman’s Acting in Shakespearean Comedy, Brian Cox’s Acting in Tragedy, Jonathan Miller’s Acting in Opera, and Maria Aitken’s Acting in High Comedy. Furthermore, Caine also published a book on film acting, Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making.
 

Consenting Adults (1982)
 
The New York Times recently profiled Vinegar Syndrome, a company that collects, catalogs, restores, and distributes antique skin flicks. And while not a vintage X aficionado myself, I was struck by the posters I found from both Vinegar Syndrome and Distribpix (another company that does re-releases); there is some truly cool and campy poster art to be found in the adult section, folks!

And as the Internet continues to cut out the middle man of the adult film industry, I’m a little sad to know that these kinds of posters have gone the way of the dinosaur, probably never to return. From corny, to clever, to downright pretty, a once dynamic medium is now no more. A moment of silence, please.
 

I Wish I Were in Dixie (1969)
 

Marilyn and the Senator (1975)
 

Open Air Bedroom (1971)
 

People (1978)
 

Spread Eagles (1968)
 

The Telephone Book (1971)
 

Tigresses (1979)
 

Wanda Whips Wall Street (1982)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘The Telephone Book’: A girl falls in love with the world’s greatest obscene phone caller
Kill the Pigs or How I Stopped Worrying and Took a Punk Vacation
Russ Meyer’s ‘Fanny Hill’: Bosomania Gets Fancy
 
Via The New York Times

Philip Seymour Hoffman with longtime collaborator Stephen Adly Guirgis

What can one say about something like this? It’s a waste. But let us not judge Philip Seymour Hoffman, let us praise him. We’ll have his many, many startling movie performances forever, and that’s how he will be most remembered. It was in the movies that Hoffman made his most profound mark, because that was the way he reached the most people, that’s how he became famous.

For me, Hoffman was almost as much a figure of the theater as of the screen. I spent a big chunk of my twenties and thirties (roughly 1996 to 2010) attending a whole lot of plays in New York City, and I can say without a shred of exaggeration that Hoffman was a key contributor to several of my most memorable moments as a theatergoer, including THE most memorable and vital and enjoyable night of theater I’ve ever experienced—bar none.

In addition to his movie work, Hoffman was a member of the LAByrinth Theater Company starting in 1995; the company had been founded by a group of actors three years earlier. Over time, partly due to Hoffman’s increasing fame and partly due to his own extensive involvement in the company, Hoffman became arguably its most important member. At LAByrinth, Hoffman forged a kind of partnership with a terrifically talented playwright named Stephen Adly Guirgis—in my estimation he is the best American playwright working today—and Hoffman directed four of his most important plays (Guirgis has written only nine plays)—Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, Our Lady of 121st Street, The Little Flower of East Orange, and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.
 

Our Lady of 121st Street
 
The working relationship between Hoffman and Guirgis is well on the way to becoming a key part of Off-Broadway legend. Guirgis is an extremely gifted talent but also a wildly undisciplined one. One of the best things about him is that he doesn’t write tidy, well-constructed plays; his plays are sprawling comic/tragic masterpieces in which you rarely know what the hell is going to happen next. (His only Broadway play so far, The Motherfucker with the Hat, had a much more conventional structure.) The word undisciplined is a pale imitation of the truth—apparently for most of Guirgis’ best plays, Hoffman had to wheedle, cajole, browbeat the damn thing into existence.

Gillian Jacobs, before she was on Community, had a part in The Little Flower of East Orange, the last play Hoffman ever directed, I believe—and she reported her experience (go to the 40th minute) of working on that Guirgis/Hoffman production:
 

The funny thing about Stephen Guirgis is that he’ll write like the first half of a play, and he’ll have that for about two years, and then he won’t write the second half of the play until about a week before the audience comes. … Turned out I didn’t have any lines in the second half of the play, so it was fine, but Ellen Burstyn had to learn a 20-minute monologue in like a week. … It’s the way he works, they literally like go to his apartment—it’s mythology at this point in the theater company of like, Phil or somebody banging on his door, to like “We need the second act!!” … I’d say like a week before the audience we got the second half of the play. I didn’t have any lines, so I was fine! But Ellen Burstyn had to learn this enormous monologue. It was crazy.

 
I saw Hoffman with his Boogie Nights co-star John C. Reilly in Sam Shepard’s True West at the Roundabout Theater in 2000. As great as that was, even better was my first experience with Guirgis, which was in 2003 for Our Lady of 121st Street at the Union Square Theater. It remains the most exciting, wonderful evening of theater I have ever experienced and certainly the best new work I have ever seen; after the show Hoffman and Guirgis and a few cast members took the stage for a stimulating Q&A.
 

 
It’s difficult to do justice to Our Lady, especially after more than ten years have passed. The play is quintessentially New York—but not in that boring “quintessentially New York” way. It’s a raucous, profane, hilarious, profound play that doesn’t necessarily hang together so much as plot but delivers nearly a dozen vivid characters in a seemingly endless series of phenomenally kinetic, evocative, moving scenes that run quite the emotional gamut. It’s one of the few plays I went back to see a second time. It was truly a special play and a special production—and Hoffman directed it.

A week or two after I saw Our Lady, eager in that way one gets to establish that I wasn’t crazy and that I had indeed seen something extraordinary, I encountered the following review by John Heilpern in The New York Observer:
 
 
 
I don’t cut reviews out of newspapers, but I made sure to keep that one.

After seeing Our Lady, I made a vow never to miss a Guirgis play if I could possibly avoid it. In the years since I have seen The Little Flower of East Orange, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, and The Motherfucker with the Hat. Those plays are quite different—Guirgis is never afraid to try something new—but all of them have top-notch dialogue, vivid characterizations, strong themes, avowedly “adult” subject matter, and a tendency to blend the comic and the tragic in an unfussy, organic, intuitive fashion that reminds me most of all of Shakespeare himself. He has his problems—as befits someone who delivers his drafts at the last minute, they’re a little shaggy; some of them might benefit from some edits. It’s safe to say that all of his characters (somewhat like those of Neil Simon) tend to talk the same way, like your hilarious, salty uncle who works at the docks. But these are scarcely complaints: Guirgis’ work is brimming with humanity in all of its aspects, always surprising and always deeply familiar and deeply dramatic. And from what I understand, we have Philip Seymour Hoffman to thank for helping tame his abilities and bring him much wider exposure than he ever would have received otherwise.

Here you can see some snippets of The Little Flower of East Orange, written by Guirgis and directed by Hoffman:

 
On February 2, 2012 (nobody could have known it then, but it was two years to the day before Hoffman’s death), I was lucky enough to catch Hoffman, Linda Emond, Andrew Garfield, and director Mike Nichols at the cozy Greene Space in New York for a conversation about Death of a Salesman:

 
In the early eighties, after he had finished making the The Shining, Stanley Kubrick began to look for another story to film, another movie to make.

“When I don’t have a story, it’s like saying a lion walking around in the veld isn’t looking for a meal. I’m always looking.”

Eventually, he found his story: The Short-Timers, a semi-autobiographical novel by Gustav Hasford about Vietnam. In 1987, Kubrick explained the book’s appeal to the Washington Post:

“This book,” Kubrick says, “was written in a very, very, almost poetically spare way. There was tremendous economy of statement, and Hasford left out all the ‘mandatory’ war scenes that are put in to make sure you understand the characters and make you wish he would get on with the story ... I tried to retain this approach in the film. I think as a result, the film moves along at an alarming – hopefully an alarming – pace….”

“I think it tries to give a sense of the war and the people, and how it affected them. I think with any work of art, if I can call it that, that stays around the truth and is effective, it’s very hard to write a nice capsule explanation of what it’s about.”

From 1983 on, Kubrick read everything he could find about Vietnam including “countless movies and documentaries, Vietnamese newspapers on microfilm from the Library of Congress and hundreds of photographs from the era.” He was relentless, obsessive, single-minded. He worked on a screenplay with Hasford and Michael Herr, which he then filmed at an old T.A. barracks, and at disused gasworks on the banks of the Thames River at Beckton. The result was Full Metal Jacket.

These brief clips of Kubrick directing Full Metal Jacket shows (as Michael Herr once described) the legendary director as “control freak” also being “philosophical about the things he can’t control.”
 

 
Bonus documentary on the making of ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ after the jump…
 

 
I saw Mike Leigh’s 1992 short film “A Sense of History” twenty years ago on Austrian TV; you wouldn’t ever expect such a thing to pop up on American TV, after all. At that time I thought it was very well executed but a bit obvious as far as satire goes; my more superannuated incarnation of the present moment thinks more highly of it. Leigh’s career has always been a kind of war between red-hot, class-based anger and nuanced, compassionate insight into human nature, and if there’s any truth to that, then “A Sense of History” is about as representative a clip of Leigh’s career as you could ever find.

A side note: Leigh’s 1993 movie Naked is my favorite movie of all time; actually, that and Altman’s Nashville share the top slot. Not long after I saw Naked, in my first “proper” journalistic endeavor, I conducted a… well, incompetent interview with Leigh, who was visiting Vienna for some film festival or other. I recorded our conversation, during which I posed a few admittedly pretentious questions about his unique style of collaborative composition, and the seemingly avuncular Leigh became quite snippy, rejecting the premise of every question and calling every other thing I said “pat thinking.” It was bizarre; he wasn’t opting out of the interview in any way but simply refused to be limited or pigeonholed—not that I blame him for this. (It was a balm to read, years later in The Village Voice, a reference to Leigh’s outsize sternness in a different context; apparently that’s just how he is!) Hilariously, once I was finished with my questions, I turned the recorder off, and we chatted for a little while, and our conversation began to flow more naturally; at one point he kindly gestured towards the recorder as if to say, “Do you want to turn that on?” but I was too stupid, timid, or misguidedly polite to do it. Ah well, lesson learned. I never did transcribe that tape, and somewhere or other I still have the business card that Leigh gave me. 
 

 
Anyway: While England’s clueless landed gentry are the ostensible target of “A Sense of History,” one might well wonder if the stuffy “Heritage film” of the 1980s and after was just as much an object of his ire. I keep referencing Leigh but after all Broadbent wrote the damn thing; I believe it remains the only movie of Leigh’s in which he does not have a writing credit. Apparently Broadbent wrote it as a radio play and then he and Leigh joined forces to make a short movie; it ended up in the exceedingly curious 1993 omnibus film Two Mikes Don’t Make a Wright alongside Michael Moore’s “Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint” and Steven Wright’s “The Appointments of Dennis Jennings.” It was also nominated for Best Short Film at the 1993 BAFTA Film Awards. Even if one disregards the satire as ineffective, the writing as such is first-rate.

Somebody once said, “Behind every great fortune there is a crime” (the question of who, exactly, said it is pretty interesting), and “A Sense of History” is a literalization of that maxim. Broadbent, familiar to American moviegoers from the Harry Potter series, Moulin Rouge!, Gangs of New York, and several of Leigh’s movies, plays the 23rd Earl of Leete, inheritor of a massive rural estate that has been in the family for 900-odd years. An early reference is made to the sacrifices the previous Earls of Leete made in order to secure and maintain the land, and damned if the 23rd Earl is going to let them down. The Earl has a veneer of doddering gentility that masks a beating heart of ruthless steel.

I’ll say this: the movie holds up much better after several years of protest against the rapacious 1%. At this point, devastating though it may be, I’m not sure it’s even a satire.
 

 
via Tombolare

 
In 1971 Estus W. Pirkle and Ron “Mesa of Lost Women” Ormond teamed up to make the deliriously apocalyptic If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? Pirkle was a Mississippi-based Baptist preacher who wrote several—books? tracts? whatever—about Hell, Heaven, and the Communist takeover of America, and Ormond is credited with directing the movie and also writing the screenplay, which was based on Pirkle’s words and narrated by Pirkle himself. In my brain Pirkle is the auteur here, but Ormond’s demented skill at concocting gruesomely vivid cut scenes is not to be denied.

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? is just under an hour long, and I would reckon that just about every single minute of it features a mind-boggling image of Communist oppression of Christianity in America or, at the very least, a garish dress pattern or two. The movie suggests a Chick Tract as directed by a redneck Ed Wood—if that description doesn’t make you want to hit “play,” I’m not sure what will.
 

Rev. Estus W. Pirkle
 
The title of the movie comes from Jeremiah 12:5: “If you have run with footmen and they have tired you out, Then how can you compete with horses? If you fall down in a land of peace, How will you do in the thicket of the Jordan?” In Pirkle’s vision, the footmen and horsemen (which he references incessantly) represent the Communist overlords of a totalitarian America that is about to happen any minute—or is already happening? Pirkle’s not super clear about what’s documented fact and what’s a likely outcome if the Christ-hating collectivists get their way.

Pirkle sincerely expects there to be a mass conflagration in the United States “within the next 24 months” that will result in “tens of millions of Americans” being “shot down like flies in our towns. Many of you listening to me today are going to see hundreds of dead bodies on the streets of your hometowns.” (Hmmm, are flies really ever “shot down”?)
 

Eek! The dread Communist horsemen!
 
The movie really has to be seen to be believed. The narrative is episodic, insofar as it frequently returns to Pirkle’s own fervent face as he describes the horrors to come, before cutting away to yet another schlocky scene of bloodthirsty Communists torturing innocent Christians and whatnot. The Communists in Pirkle’s mindset are remarkably well organized, although why they use horses to get around in 1971 is anybody’s guess (because Jeremiah 12:5 says so!). One of the terrors the Communists will impose is the mandatory consumption of “lectures” in which phrases like “Communism is good! .... Christianity is stupid!” are repeated over and over again. If that phraseology rings a bell, it’s probably because Negativland used audio samples from the movie for their signature song “Christianity is Stupid” and their 1989 opus Helter Stupid. (If you want to see that bit of business, go to minute 34.)
 

Time for the old bamboo eardrum torture
 
If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? is awash with slow pans over the bodies of massacred Christians—as always, the evangelical proclivity to entertain visions of horrifying violence is right up there with that of any atheist. (Of course, it’s all worth it if it keeps the flock on the straight and narrow.) In the communistic society to come, a moustachio’d teacher insists, “I personally believe that premarital sex is necessary” before elucidating “the seven erotic zones of passion in every woman.” (Dagnabbit, I must have missed that class at the local indoctrination center!) Later, a dastardly Commie punctures a child’s ears with bamboo shoots and—oh, for Pete’s sake, just watch it. You will be amazed.
 

 
Here’s Negativland’s “The Mashin’ of the Christ” video, set to the tune of “Christianity is Stupid”

 
Gregg Foreman’s radio program, The Pharmacy, is a music / talk show playing heavy soul, raw funk, 60′s psych, girl groups, Krautrock. French yé-yé, Hammond organ rituals, post-punk transmissions and “ghost on the highway” testimonials and interviews with the most interesting artists and music makers of our times…

This week Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins and the Bella Union record label joins Gregg in the Rx, topics include:

—How the band experimented with sound and recorded those alien soundscapes.

—Starting a record label and his advice for young bands.

 
Mr. Pharmacy is a musician and DJ who has played for the likes of Pink Mountaintops, The Delta 72, The Black Ryder, The Meek and more. Since 2012 Gregg Foreman has been the musical director of Cat Power’s band. He started dj’ing 60s Soul and Mod 45’s in 1995 and has spun around the world. Gregg currently lives in Los Angeles, CA and divides his time between playing live music, producing records and dj’ing various clubs and parties from LA to Australia.
 
Setlist

Mr. Pharmacist - The Fall
Ex Lion Tamer - Wire
Release the Bats - The Birthday Party
Intro One - Big Empty Field (no.2) - Swell Maps
Interview with Simon Raymonde Part One
Wax and Wane - Cocteau Twins
I’m So Green - Can
Isolation - Joy Division
Lady Shave - Fad Gadget
Intro Two - Channel One Dub - Linval Thompson
Interview with Simon Raymonde Part Two
Sixteen Days - This Mortal Coil
Needles in the Camel’s Eye - Brian Eno
Kick in the Eye - Bauhaus
Send Me a Postcard - Shocking Blue
Foggy Notion - The Velvet Underground
Intro Three - White Magic - Rare Birds
Interview with Simon Raymonde Part Three
Love’s Easy Tears - The Cocteau Twins
Interview with Simon Raymonde Part Four
Sugar Hiccup - The Cocteau Twins
Interview with Simon Raymonde Part Five
Intro Four - New Career in a New Town - David Bowie
Mr.Pharmacist - The Fall
Baby I Love You (Vocal Track Isolation) - The Ronettes
 

 
You can download the entire show here.
 
Below, two news reports about the Cocteau Twins concert in Columbus, Ohio on September 19, 1985