I’VE GOT FRIDAY ON MY MIND [540]

So, there was me reaching the Friday before the publication date of my next article, and once more having no idea of what to write about, and reaching an often-considered quandary: what comes to mind next that I haven’t already covered? Do I take the week off? Or do I break the emergency glass and write about the mere act of thinking of a subject, thinking this will be a clever way out of a jam?

It was a nice thought at the time, but it never works in practice. Whoever was the first to say that writing is ninety percent perspiration, and ten percent inspiration, either did well to keep themselves anonymous, or the adage itself was effectively crowdsourced.

Aside from having a social-media based trailer ahead of my next piece each week, I use my Friday to say that, yes, you are writing about this, so you must do it now. Oddly enough, the Tim Burton film “Ed Wood” was the inspiration for this, a film producer showing Wood the poster for a film that he will then make, the promises made on the poster of what the film will be like having been used to raise the money required to make it. This practice was used widely by producers like Samuel Z Arkoff and James H Nicholson of American International Pictures, the purveyors of monster horror movies and teenage beach party films – it was where Roger Corman got started, continuing the practice himself.  American International was also among the first film studios to use focus groups to find out what films their prospective audience wanted them to make, but I don’t need to go that far at this stage.

My process upon reaching my Friday deadline, which I now realise is the first of two deadlines I set myself each week, is to engage in a very literal thought process: what stands out in the street? What open tabs do I have on my phone’s web browser? If I clear my mind, what comes to mind first? Having an innate curiosity about the world around me is something I have often deployed to meet a deadline?

You would by now think that I would have a list of possible subjects ready to go, but that would be terribly convenient. I think I have come to realise that, if having a system was helpful, I would have implemented it years ago.

But, to use a film analogy again, my name is above the title. It is not the subject that is central, it is my observation of it. What comes to mind is what makes the right subject that week. It is not the fact, but the thought.

Should I really do this every week? I am making this sound exhausting. It is not like I will wither and die if I don’t do it, and it is not like people won’t go uninformed. This is when you know you are doing this for yourself, and perhaps only yourself. One million views is just the bonus.

I WANT A NEW DRUG [535]

I had the hope that, if I visit a store in a foreign country selling DVDs and Blu-rays, I will find something obscure and intriguing. In Belgium, that certainly did happen, but two facts became apparent: no film company is obliged to offer English subtitles if they are not selling to an English-language country, and if you happen across the Brussels branch of HMV, their stock is the same as their UK stores, except labelled as “UK Import”.

Fortunately for me, the French distributor Carlotta Films had released an American film from 1989 that I have only ever heard about, its name promising an interesting journey. “Dr Caligari”, directed by Stephen Sayadian and co-written with Jerry Stahl, is a loose remake of the German Expressionist horror film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920), turning it into a surreal, postmodern erotic horror, a descendent of the original doctor conducting chemical experiments to balance out the psychoses of her patients. Capturing the “midnight movie” crowd that loved Sayadian and Stahl’s previous films, the pornographic “Nightdreams” (1981) and “Café Flesh” (1985), “Dr Caligari” disappeared after its theatrical run, save for limited, sporadic releases on home video - this was the first time I had come across a copy I could buy.

The art direction and the acting in “Dr Caligari” are most definitely surreal. The setting is like a more adult version of Tim Burton’s film “Beetlejuice”, but with more vivid colours, geometric shapes and angles, reminding me of Memphis furniture once again. The acting is highly theatrical and choreographed, the result of a four-week rehearsal period: stylised and emphasised poses are held, no-one allowed to just sit or stand naturally, actors are often brought into and out of shots on platforms and turntables, and movement is also simulated by moving backgrounds.

I had wondered if “Dr Caligari”, with its strange performances and themes of fantasy and erotica, with scenes of nudity and gore - a Hollywood writer’s strike during the film’s production meant its sub-$200,000 budget could stretch to special effects artists and actors that wouldn’t have otherwise been available - was deliberately made to appeal to an audience that wanted to see something wild and screwed up. I think you can consider it to be a surreal work, thought it might be up to the viewer as to whether the “s” should be capitalised – the art direction is not a gloss on a standard Hollywood script, there is symbolic use of wounds, tongues and televisions, and there is a sense of this film working within its own reality, while also commenting on how our reality “fixes” people.

Even if so, the film is so identifiably a work by Stephen Sayadian, also its production designer and art director, record as saying it needed to attract the “midnight movie” crowd to be a success. In his work as a creative director for “Hustler” magazine, in charge of advertising, the editor of the satirical magazine “Slam”, the films “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh”, the video for Wall of Voodoo’s version of the Beach Boys song “Do It Again”, and “Jackie Charge”, a “midnight movie” style play – all of which were either written or co-written with Jerry Stahl, who would also write scripts for TV shows as disparate as “ALF” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”, reveal similarities in performance and production design. Sayadian has also said it made sense to hire himself as production designer on “Dr Caligari”, as hiring anyone else would have taken up a substantial fraction of the overall budget. “Dr Caligari” director of photography Ladi von Jansky also shot print advertisements with Sayadian, informing further the held poses and stylised motion.

I was happy to see a film that was unlike most I have seen, but if I wish to look up the remainder of Stephen Sadayian’s catalogue, I will need to remember that the even-more-adult “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh” were released under the pseudonym “Rinse Dream”.

GIVE US A SIGN THAT WE’VE REACHED YOU [264]

It seems an odd point to make that people are more accepting of alien invasion than they used to be, as if there has been a real-life test of this theory, but the reason this came to my mind was from watching Frank Oz’s director’s cut of “Little Shop of Horrors,” which might take even more of an explanation. However, when there is still only one “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” for every five films like “Independence Day,” or one “Arrival” for every ten “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” there is a case to be made that people are now more willing to see a vision of an alien invasion that results in the eradication of humanity. No longer do the only outcomes for audiences have to be “we come in peace,” or the vanquishing of a foreign force.

Since 2012, “Little Shop of Horrors” has been available in two versions: the original 1986 released version, where Rick Moranis’s Seymour and Ellen Greene’s Audrey marry and move to the suburbs, just as in Audrey’s earlier dream, the alien plant Audrey II having been vanquished in the face of  a merchandising deal that would have put the plant in every home; and the Director’s Cut, restoring the original off-Broadway musical’s ending where Audrey II was cultivated, sold, and promptly killed everyone in a glorious display of destruction that completely horrified the test audience that had grown to love the characters over the previous ninety minutes, which nearly caused Warner Bros. to shelve the film before a more acceptable ending was constructed. Frank Oz later lamented the loss of the original ending by pointing out how, on the stage, the actors come out for a curtain call at the end.

The original ending, costing twenty percent of the film’s $25 million budget, was considered lost until 2011, when producer David Geffen remembered he had a copy of it – a previous DVD release of “Little Shop of Horrors” that included black and white footage without sound and completed effects shots was withdrawn after being released in 1998 without Geffen’s knowledge. When screened at the 2012 New York Film Festival, audiences accepted Seymour’s and Audrey’s deaths with applause, and cheered at the intricate model shots of a city being eviscerated by giant Audrey IIs. Now that Audrey II was properly connected to the 1950s alien B-movies that were contemporaneous with the film’s period setting, people could look at the unfurling destruction with the post-ironic knowingness that allows you to enjoy your own demise.

This is not the only time the ending of an alien invasion film was changed to be more accepting to audiences. “Phase IV,” the 1974 science-fiction film about a group of scientists shielding against a super-intelligent colony of ants, was to have ended with a surreal sequence of images where humanity is incorporated into the now superior ant race as it rebuilds global society. It is an extremely effective sequence, especially with the knowledge that Saul Bass, the graphic designer and storyboard designer for the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” is the film’s director. However, this ending was too much for the distributor, and “Phase IV” is cut off at the point where the scientists await the ants’ instructions. Again, the proper ending wasn’t shown theatrically until 2012.

Even the original 1956 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” lost its original ending after it was topped and tailed with scenes that made the whole film into a long flashback. Instead of the police finally accepting Dr Miles Bennell’s story of giant seed pods being scattered in a road, bound for a city to replace people, the original ending should have been Dr Bennell’s frantic screams that “They’re here already! You’re next!”

The first time I remember watching an alien invasion film where humanity falls acceptably is “Mars Attacks!” What may have rendered this acceptable was the big names both in front and behind the camera: Tim Burton, Danny Elfman, Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, Tom Jones and so on, and other names you may want to see killed in the name of entertainment. Perhaps the genre tropes of science fiction are so prevalent that humanity losing is somehow a new experience, meaning the time for what was going to be called “the Intended Cut” of “Little Shop of Horrors” has now come - I’m not sure I’ll be watching the original cut for that very reason. 

O FRIENDS, NO MORE OF THESE SOUNDS! [151]

At the time of writing the United Kingdom will be leaving the European Union on Friday 29^th March, at 23:00 GMT – British Summer Time starts two days later. That night, a significant number of people will be in cinemas for the opening weekend of what I have been calling “Tim Burton’s Dumbo,” a remake twice as long as the original, in which no animals or trains will talk. The acrimony over Brexit means some may need to hear “Baby Mine” that night, a song that lost the 1941 Academy Award for Best Original Song to “Last Time I Saw Paris.”

I’ll be at home instead, watching the news – I’m not expecting anything to happen but, right now, I’m not sure anyone can tell me what will. I remember voting by post in the June 2016 referendum, meaning  I could tune out of the fighting between the Leave and Remain campaigns, but once 51.89% of 72.21% of the electorate, or 17.41 million people, voted to leave, the debate on how to interpret the result began, something that appears to be unresolved to this day: the Prime Minister is hoping to renegotiate the new working arrangement already made with the European Union, her hand forced by tribalism within her own party that dates back decades, and an inability for Parliament, with no sense of urgency until the last moment, to reach a consensus at a time when it truly mattered.

I am not happy about the state of anxiety I am forced to endure about Brexit, not least because making fun of politics in the United States is becoming increasingly hypocritical. I can speculate on what will eventually fill the shelves of the Donald Trump Presidential Library, and lament on how the divisive rhetoric is laid at the feet of man named Newt (Gingrich, that is), but this is hypocritical when British politics has fallen prey to the same partisan division. When an entire airline, Flybmi (formerly British Midland International), can collapse in your own country because of the economic effect of Brexit indecision, the same indecision that will add 10% to the cost of a new Porsche, and probably also to the cost of my next iPad – something that could also be released on Friday 29^th March – seemingly the only option left is for me to sit back and take whatever economic hit will be passed through the economy to me by being submitted to International Monetary Fund rules.

Of course, something could be pulled out of the fire, and everything could work out for the best, but anything with as glacial a pace as changing the direction of a country means we should have indicated which way we were going to turn, and whether the country will still be making any cars afterwards. I may be able to bring myself to say more come the end of March, if any consensus in this country is reached about what we actually want – even I may want to see “Tim Burton’s Dumbo” by then.