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That time Ian McCulloch dressed up as Dorothy from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ for a photo shoot
05.27.2016
11:38 am
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To greet the 1990s, NME commissioned a photo shoot for its last issue of 1989 (December 23-30 issue) featuring Ian McCulloch, the presiding genius of Echo and the Bunnymen, in which he dressed up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

Here’s the original spread, which appeared under the banner “Screen-Age Kicks”:
 

 
The pictures are an undisputed success, due in no small part to McCulloch’s utter lack of distancing camp affectation or irony. It’s almost as if McCulloch knows damn well that he’s gorgeous, so why not go with it? (Actually, about that. See McCulloch’s remarks on the shoot below.)

Two years ago Buzzfeed did a list explaining why McCulloch was the 1980s version of Kanye West. The list is essentially a collection of astonishingly confident, self-admiring quotations from McCulloch, as in “The Bunnymen are the most important band to ever put an album out. And the Beatles, maybe the Stones. I think we’re up there in the top ten greatest bands of all time.”

Maybe something of that attitude is caught in the photo?

For a “Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes” feature in the pages of Uncut twenty years later, McCulloch reminisced about the photo shoot—his comments are frankly hilarious and a little bit baffling (calling Judy Garland “a bit iffy” and a “weirdo”):
 

The NME were doing this thing—who do you wanna be? Obviously Bono would’ve plumped for the hunchback of Notre Dame. But I thought Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, ‘cos she looked a bit iffy. I thought, to get my own back at the girls on the bus who thought I had lippy on—and I knew at the time, I’m a better-looking girl than you are—let’s jazz this Dorothy up, give her some beauty, not the weirdo Judy looked. Mark E. Smith—whooh! Frank Black—I’d hate to see him doing a picture from Last Tango in Paris. It was down to me. And I did it well.

 

 
In 2011 the well-known someecards company concocted an ecard that poked fun at McCulloch:
 

 
“It was down to me. And I did it well.” As a reminder of what could have given Ian such a massive ego to begin with, here’s a hefty chunk of footage of Echo and the Bunnymen playing the Royal Albert Hall in 1983:
 

 
via Fuck Yeah Bunnymen
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Echo and the Bunnymen rock Liverpool on BBC 2’s ‘Pop Carnival,’ 1982

Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.27.2016
11:38 am
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Someone has ALPHABETIZED ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and the result is amazing
01.04.2016
11:41 am
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Matt Bucy is probably best known in the world of fan fiction—he’s the co-producer and cinematographer for the impressive and ongoing series of fan-made Star Trek episodes called Star Trek Continues which endeavors to function (unofficially and non-canonically, of course) as a continuation of Star Trek TOS after its third and final season. Five episodes have been made since 2013, all of which have done a fine job of recreating the look and feel of the original 1960s Star Trek episodes. All of them are viewable online, and a sixth episode is scheduled for release this spring.
 

 
And somehow, amid his professional work, Bucy found the time to pull of one of the most brain-meltingly OCD remix stunts ever attempted: he’s alphabetized the indelibly classic 1939 film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. The result is called Of Oz the Wizard, and it’s a mind-scramble to watch. So we’re clear on what exactly has been done here, Bucy re-edited the entire film so that every word of dialogue appears in alphabetical order—he even rearranged the credits. Repetitions of oft-recurring words are sometimes jarring, sometimes hilarious, sometimes actually musical. My favorite sections are “ARF” (I’m a dog person, sue me), “DEAD,” “HOW,” and, surprise surprise, “ROAD.” (Don’t even get me started on “BECAUSE,” good lord…)  I had to know what kind of person would do something so wonderfully insane, so I reached out to Bucy, who was kind enough to spare us some of his time to answer questions.

Dangerous Minds: GOOD GOD, MAN, WHY DID YOU DO THIS CRAZY THING?

Matt Bucy: It was a challenge from a friend, Ray Guillette, to do something never done before. While on a short road trip, he said he didn’t think anything original was possible. I said nonsense! He asked for an example. I hatched the idea then, pretty much complete, and we riffed on the idea for a while. Then I totally forgot about it. But a couple years later he asked me when I was going to make this original thing. I said I’d hop on it right away and thanked him for saving the project!

DM: When was this done and how long did it take?

MB: The idea was hatched in 2001 (I think) and then I actually did it in April 2004. It has been shown sporadically since then, most recently at MIX in NYC a couple years ago.

It didn’t take too long. In a couple of days I wrote a bit of code to help disassemble the movie, then the disassembly took me and another friend three days to complete. It was a manual process but it went very quickly. It was pretty difficult to speak after a day of disassembly! It really messed with my head. The credits took another day. I had to wait for the right moody clouds to show up where I live so I could re-shoot the sky pan that lies under the credits. In total no more than a week of work.

DM: I really love the rhythms that are created by some of the most oft-repeated words. And there are some long passages of wordlessness. Could you talk about what edit criteria other than the alphabet you followed, or were those decisions more intuitive?

MB: The editing criteria were simple and strict. Alphabetical then chronological. The only subjective decisions were about how to spell things like screams and breathing. I consulted a friend, James Sturm, who co-founded the cartoon school here in town about some of these since they appear in cartoons all the time.

DM: You dug around in the guts of a classic piece of popular art, one that people know intimately already. How did the process transform your view of the film?

MB: My appreciation for the film increased enormously, mostly in a technical sense while disassembling. I saw and heard things I’d never seen before and which you would only see going frame by frame. I saw how much craft there is in the film. With headphones on and listening to sections over and over I heard how much the soundtrack is edited to sound smooth, for instance. I had no idea what the final result of my edit would be. I had concern that it’d just be a mess, but on first play that concern evaporated into laughs, screams, jumping up and down and astonishment. I got pretty excited!

Interesting discovery: there are less than a thousand unique words in the film. Most words are used only once. Also, there are mistakes! And people are finding them and letting me know, some angrily! Amusing. I guess that’s what happens when you mess with a classic.
 


 
Via Negativland’s Facebook page

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Jodorowsky on blast: El Topo and Holy Mountain get an audio-visual remix
Animator of twisted Lewis Carroll reboot ‘Malice in Wonderland’ has done a bizarre ‘Wizard of Oz’

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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01.04.2016
11:41 am
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‘Bye Bye Charlie’: Ann-Margret meets the Manson of Oz


 
Two rather odd experiments using the blue screen effect to put Ann-Margret’s candy-colored intro and reprise to Bye Bye Birdie into a nightmare context. Both are disturbing for different reasons. The Wizard Of Oz clip is almost Buñuelian in its sepia-tinged surrealism. While the sludgy-looking Manson mash-up is just plain creepy.

The Burroughs-Gysin cut-up method applied to one of America’s teen dreams results in something bordering on the horrifying and apocalyptic
 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.30.2011
01:06 pm
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