As part of their promotional push for Robert Rodriguez’s controversial exploitation flick Machete, 20th Century Fox commissioned filmmakers to do ‘lifestyle’ videos of the folks involved with making the movie. This first one, directed by Estevan Oriol from SA Studios, features perennial badass Danny Trefo lowriding in East L.A.. with his buddy Mr. Cartoon.
Rodriguez knocked me out with his zombie gorefest Planet Terror, so I have high hopes for Machete. Trejo as a ridiculously over-armed desperado looks like my kind of hero, Billy Jack on steroids.
Thunderbird is the crack cocaine of wines. It’s fortified with additional alcohol to get you drunk quicker. If you drink enough of the swill it will turn your tongue black, incinerate your gut and napalm your liver. The Gallo Wine Co. designed their firewater with the ghetto in mind. Their radio ads featured a song with a proto-rap vibe, “What’s the word? / Thunderbird / How’s it sold? / Good and cold / What’s the jive? / Bird’s alive / What’s the price? / Thirty twice.” It is said that…
Ernest Gallo once drove through a tough, inner city neighborhood and pulled over when he saw a bum. When Gallo rolled down his window and called out, “What’s the word?” the immediate answer from the bum was, “Thunderbird.
In a move that seems almost surreal, actor James Mason was recruited by Gallo to pitch its poverty punch. He was given a Rolls Royce as payment. Years later, Mason went on to star as a vicious slave owner in the soft-core blaxploitation potboiler Mandingo. Thunderbird shill to sleazoid slave owner ain’t much of a stretch character wise and probably didn’t earn him any dividends in the karma department.
The first ad in the following video tries to glamorize Thunderbird as a sexy, hip and happening cocktail for young stylish Blacks. The second is Mason trying to keep a straight face as he describes Thunderbird as “not quite like anything I’ve ever tasted.’
In 1983 Dennis Hopper went to Rice University in Houston, Texas ostensibly to screen his latest film Out Of The Blue. But little known to anyone, other than Hopper and a handful of his buddies, he had another agenda entirely. While he did indeed screen his movie, Hopper had actually come to Houston to blow himself up.
After screening Out Of The Blue, Hopper arranged to have the audience driven by a fleet of school buses to a racetrack on the outskirts of Houston, the Big H Speedway. Hopper and the buses arrived at the speedway just as the races were ending and a voice was announcing over the public address system “stick around folks and watch a famous Hollywood film personality perform the Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act. That’s right, folks, he’ll sit in a chair with six sticks of dynamite and light the fuse.”
Was famous Hollywood personality Dennis Hopper about to go out with a bang?
Hopper apparently learned this stunt when he was a kid after seeing it performed in a traveling roadshow. If you place the dynamite pointing outwards the explosion creates a vacuum in the middle and the person performing the stunt is, if all goes according to plan, unharmed.
After bullshitting for awhile with the crowd and his friends, a drunk and stoned Hopper climbed into the “death chair’ and lit the dynamite.
Rice News correspondent describes the scene:
Dennis Hopper, at one with the shock wave, was thrown headlong in a halo of fire. For a single, timeless instant he looked like Wile E. Coyote, frazzled and splayed by his own petard. Then billowing smoke hid the scene. We all rushed forward, past the police, into the expanding cloud of smoke, excited, apprehensive, and no less expectant than we had been before the explosion. Were we looking for Hopper or pieces we could take home as souvenirs? Later Hopper would say blowing himself up was one of the craziest things he has ever done, and that it was weeks before he could hear again. At the moment, though, none of that mattered. He had been through the thunder, the light, and the heat, and he was still in one piece. And when Dennis Hopper staggered out of that cloud of smoke his eyes were glazed with the thrill of victory and spinout.
In this video footage shot by filmmaker Brian Huberman, we see Hopper in all his intoxicated glory before and after his death defying stunt.
Huberman on the film clip:
The large guy making the sign of the cross is the writer Terry Southern and the jerk threatening to blow up my camera is the German filmmaker, Wim Wenders.
Watching these Kodachrome color tests from 1922 actually took my breath away for a moment. I felt as though time had stopped and I’d entered a dream. The colors are so sensual I felt like devouring them, inhaling them like opium. This stunning footage is archived at the George Eastman House and is an early test of the Two-Color Kodachrome Process.
In these newly preserved tests, made in 1922 at the Paragon Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, actress Mae Murray appears almost translucent, her flesh a pale white that is reminiscent of perfectly sculpted marble, enhanced with touches of color to her lips, eyes, and hair. She is joined by actress Hope Hampton modeling costumes from The Light in the Dark (1922), which contained the first commercial use of Two-Color Kodachrome in a feature film. Ziegfeld Follies actress Mary Eaton and an unidentified woman and child also appear.
Read more about these gorgeous moving pictures here.
Beatnik chicks rule. Phillipa Fallon and Vampira move imaginary furniture in the coffeehouses of our minds.
Two groovy clips from High School Confidential and The Beat Generation.
The words to ‘High School Drag’ (the poem in the HSC clip) were written by B-movie screenwriter Mel Welles who seemed to have the right credentials for writing bop prose, “I was an expert on grass in my day…” Welles also wrote hep talk for hipster royalty Lord Buckley.
Swing with a gassy chick.
Turn on to a thousand joys.
Smile on what happened, or check what’s going to happen,
You’ll miss what’s happening.
Turn your eyes inside and dig the vacuum.
Vampira went on to have a full-blown TV and film career, but what happened to the exquisite of Phillipa Fallon? She only made two films after High School Confidential, which is hard to believe considering the indelible impression she makes in that brief moment when the planets aligned and beatific angels kissed the foreheads of teenyboppers everywhere as Phillipa laid the beatnik gospel upon us. Ms. Fallon should have been a mega-star.
Check out the rat Vampira is cuddling while she versifies.
After the jump, Dennis Hopper as a beatnik in a 1964 episode of Petticoat Junction and the full text of the poem ‘High School Drag’ in all its glory.
Bollywood mega-mix featuring clips from Teesri Manzel, Bhoot Bangla, Chikubuku Chikubuku Railay, O Meri Maina, Pyar Hi Pyar, Ellam Inba Mayam.
Ann Margret, Elvis, Chubby Checker, Parliament Funkadelic, Michael Jackson, Little Richard, Ronnie Spector…Bollywood style. 30 minutes of vindaloo au-go-go: rock, funk and disco.
Over the past few years there have been a number of fanboys who have attempted to reconstruct Star Wars as a silent film. They convert the film to black and white, speed it up and add an old-fashioned piano score. But the ones I’ve seen have failed miserably to authentically replicate the actual look of a real silent movie…until now. This new one succeeds marvelously. It looks like something unearthed from the 1920’s - a really shitty print of a Metropolis outtake. Mark Hamill’s melodramatic facial expressions, his broad gestures and the heightened shadowing of his eyes resemble that of so many actors of the silent era.
Norman Mailer claimed he was “imprisoned with a vision” which would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” Unfortunately for Mailer, he was far too good a writer to ever do that.
The writers who have achieved such a “revolution” have always produced poorly written and unrelentingly dull books. Marx and Hitler may have changed history, but ‘Das Kapital’ and ‘Mein Kampf’ will never be page turners, let alone literature.
As for Mailer, he wrote over 40 books, a dozen of which are important works of literature. No small feat when considering how often Mailer was reckless with his talents. Now Joseph Mantegna has directed a documentary film, called ‘Norman Mailer: The American‘, which examines the life of the great novelist, journalist, film director, and actor and promises to reveal the man behind these multiple lives, with unseen footage, and interviews from his wives, his children, his lovers, his enemies.
When Martin Amis unflatteringly compared Mailer and his legacy to the ruins of Ozymandias‘ two vast and trunkless legs of stone, languishing in the desert, Amis failed to appreciate how Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s poem had made the great King immortal. Mailer’s life and books don’t need a Shelley, but it’s certainly about time someone assessed the great man’s life and work, and thankfully it looks like Joseph Mantegna has stepped up to the plate.
