Druidic, droning space-rockers Lumerians perform a hoodoo-infused cover of The Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses” on San Francisco public access program Dance Party Revival.
Their debut album, Transmalinnia
Françoise Dorleac made her first film when she just 15. “A photographer asked if I would model for some fashion pictures and I said fine. A producer saw my pictures in the press and hired me for a small role for a film during the school holidays.” Acting was in her blood. Her father, Maurice Dorleac, was a veteran character actor of stage and screen; her mother, Renee Simonot, was an actress who revoiced Hollywood films, including Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz; her younger sister is Catherine Deneuve.
Françoise was as beautiful, as talented, and as big an international star as her younger sister. However, Françoise wasn’t as ambitious or as wild as Catherine.
“I see myself as a girl who is always dreaming of romance, and the man she wants to marry, a girl who dances when she is happy.”
Françoise made sixteen films during her short career, including Roman Polanski’s classic film Cul de Sac, in which she brilliantly captured the self-obsessed Teresa against the weak and dominated, Donald Pleasance, as George. Françoise gave substance to Francois Truffaut’s tale of adultery La Peau Douce (aka The Soft Skin), and was almost a match for Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer in Ken Russell’s greatly under-rated The Billion Dollar Brain .
On 26 June 1967, Françoise died in an horrific accident when she lost control of her rented car on the Esterel-Côte d’Azur freeway. She was traveling to Nice airport to fly to London, where she was to finish filming on The Billion Dollar Brain . The car flipped over and burst into flames. Witnesses saw the actress struggle to escape the vehicle, but she was unable to open the door. Police identified Dorleac from a stub of her check book, her diary and her driving license.
Her early death at the age 25, has often over-shadowed the quality of her work - both as actress and singer - and it robbed cinema of “a tried and true talent and incomparably beautiful mademoiselle who showed every sign of taking Hollywood by storm.”
Here is something to remember her by: the beautiful and wonderful Françoise singing, Mario J’ai Mal. Plus a bonus clip of Françoise with her sister Catherine Deneuve in the candy-colored musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (aka The Young Girls of Rochefort), in which they co-starred with Gene Kelly.
Bonus clip of Françoise Dorleac and Catherine Deneuve, after the jump…
With thanks to Tony Vermillion
Dada artist and filmmaker, Hans Richter made Ghosts Before Breakfast (AKA Vormittagsspuk) in 1927. In it, inanimate objects come to life and rebel against their normal routines. Extremely clever use of stop-motion animation, it’s as if the art form is practically being invented before your eyes… because it kinda was.
A version of Ghosts Before Breakfast with a soundtrack was destroyed in the Nazi purge of “degenerate art.” The music here is by Nikolai von Sallwitz. His modern score is pretty effective.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Dreams Money Can Buy: Surrealist Feature Film from 1947
The Monitors is a sci-fi satire made by the Bell & Howell motion picture equipment company in conjunction with Chicago’s famed comic improv group, The Second City (which has given the world top comic talent like Joan Rivers, Steve Carell, John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, much of the SCTV cast and many others). It is the only feature film that The Second City has ever made.
Not surprisingly, The Monitors comes off like longform sketch comedy, but with a (slightly) dark edge. A race of aliens wearing bowler hats, black turtlenecks and black suits—probably for reasons of budget—has taken over the White House and keeps the population in line with an Orwellian government where sex, violence, politics and display of emotions are forbidden. A group of humans decide to “take their country back,” with predicable power struggles.
The main roles are filled by Guy Stockwell (the knife-throwing father in Santa Sangre) and Susan Oliver (Peyton Place). Larry Storch (F Troop), Ed Begley Sr., and actual Second City alum Avery Schrieber (where were the others??? Stuck in the bit parts!) also have major roles.
Weirdly, Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (the one-time Republican Senate Minority leader who helped write key civil rights legislation) makes a cameo appearance, basically playing himself. Odetta sings the closing them song! It was shot by future Oscar-winner Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, McCabe and Mrs. Miller).
This used to be on late night TV all the time. I haven’t thought about this film in years, but now it’s on the Netflix VOD.
Below, the opening to The Monitors:
Thank you, Rich Lindsay!
Led by Grammy-winning ex-Digable Planets MC Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler—who now does business under the moniker Palaceer Lazaro—Shabazz Palaces have been turning out some opaquely produced, envelope-pushing tunes for a couple of years now.
Early on, almost two years ago now, they got director Khalil Joseph—who recently directed Seu Jorge’s “The Model” video—to put together something for their tune “Bellhaven Meridian.” Lots to love in the untypical video, including the fact that it’s one take. But Joseph takes an interesting short detour to recreate a scene from Killer of Sheep, African-American director Charles Burnett’s poetic black & white neo-realist film from 1978.
Depicting the trials of a Watts slaughterhouse worker, his family, and his community, Killer… went unreleased for a while due to the prohibitive licensing costs of Burnett’s proposed soundtrack. It was finally restored and resurfaced in 2007 and is available on DVD.
After the jump: check out the powerful scene from Killer of Sheep that Joseph mimicked…
The kind folks over at ModCinema recently sent me a fantastic 2-hour compilation culled from the ranks of the many incredible—and long out of print, or never released in versions with English subtitles—films that they carry. It’s titled Colorspace Vol.1 and covers the “mod” cultural territory of 60s/70s film and television. Interspersed with trailers from films like Barbarella, I Love You Alice B. Toklas and dozens more (many that I’d never even heard of before) you’ll find wonderful vintage TV ads and musical performances from Los Bravos(!), Tommy Roe, Brigitte Bardot, Nancy Sinatra and Colorspace Vol. 1 is especially well art-directed. Professional graphic designers and design snobs will love it.
Order your copy of Colorspace Vol. 1 from Mod Cinema.
The below clip, from 1968’s Erotissimo, is a fine exemplar of the ModCinema esthetic:
Oliver Reed and Keith Moon had a bizarre and incredible friendship that brought them close to the edge of madness and ultimately lead to their untimely deaths.
Their friendship began during the making of Ken Russell’s Tommy, as mutual acquaintance Lee Patrick recalled:
I was living with Keith Moon at the time and they were just about to start filming Tommy, Keith and I had spent all morning driving Soho’s sex shops buying dildoes, rubber stuff etc for Keith to use as props for Uncle Ernie.
At lunchtime Keith decided to drop into Ken Russell’s office and mentioned that he’d like to meet Ollie before they started filming, Ken immediately got on the phone to Ollie and suggested a meeting, Ollie invited us to Broome Hall afternoon so we were off to Battersea Heliport where we boarded a helicopter to take us there. We arrived on his front lawn shortly afterward, unfortunately frightening his pregnant horses, Ollie was standing there in the doorway holding two-pint mugs whisky for us. He was a charming host and invited us to stay for dinner.
Dinner was served on a huge medieval oak table and before we started eating Ollie jumped up and grabbed two large swords which were hanging on the wall, giving one to Keith. The two of them ended up having a sword fight up and down the table, that was the appetizer! After dinner Ollie invited us down to his local pub, The Cricketers, where we all got very drunk, with Ollie and Keith undressing, each one trying to outdo the drunken antics of the other, they were so alike that it was no wonder they became great friends.
Later on, back at Broome Hall, Ollie insisted we stay the night, we were up for that, expecting to be sleeping in a magnificent bedroom, however, his entourage took up all the furnished bedrooms and we were led out to the stables!! Keith said we would pass up his invitation and go home, but Ollie would have none of it, and next thing we knew he was standing there pointing an old shotgun at us, so we said OK we’ll stay, we ended up sleeping on couches in the living room!
Reed was Britain’s highest paid and most successful film star, something he was always keen to let any scandal-mongering press know:
‘I’m the biggest star this country has got. Destroy me and you destroy the whole British film industry.’
He had also been voted the sexiest actor alive and told Photoplay magazine:
‘I may look like a Bedford truck, but the women know there’s a V-8 engine underneath.’
Though he also claimed the film world wasn’t where his ambitions lay:
‘I have two ambitions in life: one is to drink every pub dry, the other is to sleep with every woman on earth.’
It was disingenuous, for Reed was quite serious about his acting. He was “always word perfect and unfailingly courteous to colleagues and technicians.” Reed was well respected as an actor, and according to Michael Winner, a professional on set. Off set was something else entirely. Reed had once been within “a sliver” of replacing Sean Connery as James Bond in the film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but Reed’s reputation as a hell-raiser meant the part went to George Lazenby.
By 1975, Reed had made an impressive range of films, including I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (the first film to have the word “fuck” in it); The Jokers; The Assassination Bureau; Hannibal Brroks; The Shuttered room; Women in Love (first male-full frontal nudity, a scene which was not in the original script, and was only included after Reed encouraged Russell to film it); Sitting Target; and perhaps his best film, The Devils.
Reed had formed a creative partnership with Ken Russell, the director he called “Jesus Christ,” since they had worked together on the BBC TV drama The Debussy film. It was because of this partnership that the non-singing Reed was cast in the role of Frank in the musical Tommy. Moon hoped Reed would help him develop a career as an actor. But as the pair capered and drank copiously off set, their boozing was to have a debilitating effect for Moon on set:
Reed’s part got bigger and bigger as Keith Moon’s got smaller and smaller, probably due to Ken Russell’s familiarity with Oliver, and the fact that he could drink himself into stupor at night and show up on time and line-perfect in the morning, while Moonie remained stuporous.
Their friendship was an unstable chemical compound based on drink, drugs, sex, and pranks, as Reed once said:
‘I like the effect drink has on me. What’s the point of staying sober?’
The life of excess has but one destination, and as Cliff Goodwin wrote in his definitive biography of Reed, Evil Spirits, the end came during Reed’s 40th birthday party at a swanky hotel in Hollywood, when Moon decided to liven things up with his impersonation of a “human helicopter”. Moon jumped onto a table, grabbed the blades of an overhead fan and began to spin around, above the heads of the invited guests. Unfortunately, the blades had slashed Moon’s hands and arms and he splattered the A-list celebrities with gore.
It was the moment that Reed realized the genie was well and truly out of the bottle and that he or Moon would die from their life of excess. Tragically, it was Moon who died six months later. Reed never recovered from Moon’s death, and later claimed a day didn’t go by when he didn’t think about Moon the Loon.
Here is a visual interpretation of the type of hallucination one can experience on LSD while wearing an executioner’s hood.
I’ll have to try this sometime.
Scenes from Road to the Stars and 2001, side-by-side.
Film-maker Alessandro Cima has posted some fascinating clips from Pavel Klushantsev’s classic 1957 Russian science-fiction film The Road to the Stars, over at Candlelight Stories. Forget Kubrick’s 2001 for as Cima explains, Klushantsev’s masterpiece was the first and arguably the better of the two films.
Pavel Klushantsev’s 1957 film, Road to the Stars, features astoundingly realistic special effects that were an inspiration and obvious blueprint for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ten years later. The film is an extended form of science education, building upon existing 1950s technology to predict space exploration of the future. The sequences with astronauts in zero gravity are incredibly realistic. The second excerpt from the film features the construction of and life aboard a space station in earth orbit that is not only convincing but also beautiful. There are several scenes with space station dwellers using videophones that anticipate the famous Kubrick videophone scene.
Watching these short clips now, it is no surprise that The Road to the Stars has been described as:
...one of the most amazing special effects accomplishments in film history.
However, Klushantsev faced considerable difficulties in making such an effects-heavy film, at one point being asked by one Communist Party bureaucrat why he didn’t make a film about factory manufacturing or beetroot production, but as Klushantsev explained:
The Road to the Stars proved to me I did the right thing thing, one must envisage the future. People should be able to see life can be changed radically.
Klushantsev started work on the film in 1954, and liaised thru-out with Russia’s leading space program scientists, Mikhail Tikhonravov and Sergey Korolyov, to achieve accuracy with his own designs - from space suits, to cabin temperature and rocket design. Indeed, everything in Klushantsev’s film had to at least have an element of possiblity and it is this factual core that gave Klushantsev’s film a documentary-like feel. The film coincided with the launch of Russia’s robotic spacecraft, Sputnik, and led the previously antagonistic Russian bureaucrats to “foam at the mouth” and demand The Road to the Stars include shots of of the satellite in the film.
Bonus clips, plus short making-of documentary, after the jump…
Peter Haskett and Raymond Huffman, the screaming, swearing borderline insane duo of San Francisco drunks who had their violent and idiotic arguments immortalized in multimedia as “Shut Up Little Man!” have now had a documentary film made about them called Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure which premieres at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend.
If you are, as yet, unaware, of the (perhaps dubious, but I’d say sublime) pleasures of the Shut Up Little Man!, er… legend, here is how the recordings came to be, described by “Eddie Lee Sausage,” who along with his roommate, “Mitchell D,” made the tapes of their belligerent, violent neighbors, eventually releasing them into the world, first on cassette and later CD:
We were introduced to the saga of Peter and Raymond when we moved next door to them in the fall of 1987. As neighbors, we lived in the same Pepto-Bismol-colored apartment building in San Francisco’s Lower Haight. The building was designed like a cheap motel, so that the apartments were sardined alongside one another and separated by thin walls.
Within a week of our arrival, we were exposed to what would become a dependable routine from our next door neighbors: evenings charged with belligerent rants, hateful harangues, drunken soliloquies, death threats, and the sound of wrestling bodies thumping against the wall that separated our apartments. Peter and Raymond fought with a raging abandon and total disregard for everyone in the building. Initially, we were angered by the volume and recurrence of the arguments, but equally we were intimidated by the threatening content. Whenever we got angry enough to go next door, confront them and ask them to keep the noise down, we were forced to give the idea a second thought. Perched in their front window, facing the walkway greeting all who dared pass, was a human skull; what horror would greet us? However, one can be meek and tolerant for only so long. Unnerved by sleepless nights and Peter’s incessant refrain, “Shut Up Little Man” one of us banged on their door, only to receive the first of many murderous death threaths from Ray. “I’m perfectly willing to kill anyone that thinks they’re tough. I was a killer before you were born, I’ll be a killer after you’re dead.” Soon thereafter the notion of recording their threats — in case of the need for criminal proof of an assault — was born.
Shut Up Little Man! has been made into stage plays, an indie film, a number of CD recordings and Peter and Raymond (who are both long dead) have been drawn by Daniel Clowes and seen some of their best lines woven into dialogue in SpongeBob SquarePants cartoons. And now there is a documentary about them. Not bad for a “fuckin’ piece of shit” and a “queer cocksucker” (both deceased) now is it?
Here is an excerpt from the first Shut Up Little Man! CD. Sounding like Sartre’s No Exit if it had been written by Samuel Beckett collaborating with Charles Bukowsi and El Duce, as all three chugged bottles of Night Train, this is how most people were first introduced to Raymond and Peter:
The awesome short by renowned animation director Kevin Peaty (The Lion King, The Little Mermaid):“Shut Up, Little Man!”
The trailer for the new documentary, Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
Thank you, Aimee Knight!