Take the Money and Run

We are kind of grasping at straws with the sixties because both of us have watched a large amount of the more well known "mainstream" movies on our own time, so today we chose to watch Take the Money and Run.

Kamala: I had seen this one before, I really like Woody Allen movies, and this one is the first movie he ever directed.

Emily: It was produced by United Artists. In the early 60's, UA bought a TV channel that produced Gilligan's Island and other successful shows. Basically, unlike most other big studios in the 1960's, UA had money. In 1967, two years before Take the Money and Run was made, UA was bought by Transamerica. The new ownership encouraged, even more than before, new and innovative directors such as Woody Allen, Robert Altman, and more. This allowed for a lot of artistic freedom for directors like Allen, who was able to direct his first feature film for himself, with all his characteristic humor.

Kamala: Oooh we should watch a Robert Altman sometime...

Emily: I thought this one was really funny. There is this one scene where Woody Allen's character, Virgil Starkwell, is trying to play cello, sitting down in a chair, with a marching band. He spends like 30 seconds fumbling with the chair, bow, and cello and trying to keep out of the way of his fellow bandmembers.

Kamala: It is filled with classic Woody Allen little detail jokes, along with his adorable jew humor. In prison Virgil volunteers to try out an experimental vaccine. The only side effect he discovers is that he is temporarily transformed into a rabbi.

Emily: This movie was hilarious. People mostly think that the only Woody Allen movies worth watching are Manhattan and Annie Hall, but this movie proves that his earlier films are just as good. I guess by earlier films I mean some of his sillier, lesser known comedies like Love and Death, Bananas, What's Up Tiger Lily, Casino Royale, What's New Pussycat, and finally Take the Money and Run. All of which Kamala has seen, strangely, I didn't realize how much she likes Woody Allen movies.

Kamala: yeah

Dynamite Chicken

Dynamite Chicken was made in 1969 by Richard Pryor and some friends of his. They tried to capture the zietgiest of the late 60's with the vietnam war, Nixon, censorship, changing sexual mores, and hair in different segments narrated by comedians, actors, Allen Ginsberg, and some other people I have never heard of. It featured many prominent cultural icons such as Andy Warhol, Joan Baez, the music of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Malcolm X.

Emily: This movie utilized the cut-up technique, which we observed in the William S. Burroughs shorts, with flashes of different videos from the 50s and 60s, advertisements, news clips, naked women, and weird comedians. However, the way it kept coming back to Richard Pryor in some alley with a basketball gave it some continuity and pulled it together.

Kamala: It also eschewed narrative continuity. I wanted to watch Dynamite Chicken as another example of the chaos and opposing "contrasts," as the movie repeatedly repeated, that made up the socio-political scene in the late 1960s. We should have watched this one with Easy Rider, or even before it, but it just came today in the Netflix and that is how the cookie crumbles.

Emily: The credits called it a "A contemporary probe and commentary of the mores and maladies of our age.....with shtick, bits, pieces, girls, some hamburger, a little hair, a lady, some fellas, some religious stuff, and a lot of other things." which I think is pretty accurate. One of my favorite bits was the beginning, when we hear a male and female voice in the dark, talking about...what they have just done in the dark-and the girl asks for a light and then you hear like five other voices also asking for the lighter. ....It was an orgy. I don't know if I explained it very well.

Kamala: .....

This is kind of the definition of an independent film. It was financed in part by John Lennon, and distributed by some company called Tango Entertainment. It features many "counterculture" (I'm using that word for lack of a better one) icons, and has an intellectual or artistic agenda in that it rallies against censorship, police violence, racial politics, religion, the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon.

Emily: The first scene is also great- a big fat guy walks out of his apartment to the 2001 music (when the apes discover the monolith). Richard Pryor is hysterical, and Fred Willard is in it! (that guy from all the Christopher Guest movies)

The Cut-Ups, Towers Open Fire and William Buys a Parrot: A William S. Burroughs Triple Feature

We chose these because the Netflix description made them seem like really avant garde, really really independent short films.
Good god they were.

William S. Burroughs was an author of the beat generation famous for such novels as Naked Lunch and Junkie. He collaborated with artist Brion Gysin and director Anthony Balch to create these shorts to make visual representations of the god knows what in Burroughs' mind. Gysin is "famous" for coming up with a concept called called "the cut-up technique." Burroughs wanted to use cut-up in his writing, and Gysin used it in his art. They would cut and paste and mix and match pieces of a whole in no particular order to find a truer new meaning in something regular. ( if you are really interested...) In the films, it manifested as very very quick jump cuts between three or four different story lines, if you can call them that, where the scene would vary maybe 3 times in 5 seconds between random moving symbols, a man and woman walking down the street, a man staring at a whirling lamp, and other strange things.

Emily: They eschewed conventional narrative form. They eschewed it in every way possible.

Kamala: We wanted to watch this to show that people were thinking intellectually about the films they were making and while it would have been difficult to watch this in 1963, I guess it is good to know that films like this were out there pushing the cinematographic envelope. That said, it was tedious and difficult to watch.

Emily: Here is a list of films Anthony Balch distributed:
Do You Like Women?
The Kinky Darlings
Lot in Sodom
Secrets of Sex (he also directed this one)
The Importance of Being Sexy
18 Year Old Schoolgirls

Both he and William S. were into appalling Sadean horror and exploitation film, and hints of this fascination are present in the short films in this compliation. The first movie, "William Buys a Parrot" is fairly straightforward, but "Towers Open Fire" had some creepy imagery, with soldiers. And the cut-ups feature close-ups on faces, people walking, and repetition of the words "Yes" "Hello" "Thank you" and the phrase "Does it seem to be persisting?" Not going to lie-we stopped maybe half-way through The Cut-Ups. It's all on youtube if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAxUWfe_PJY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc3bp7s0378&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc3bp7s0378&feature=related

Cleopatra

Kamala: I will introduce this one because it is one of my favorite movies ever. Cleopatra is famous for being the "biggest flop" in the history of American film. This doesn't mean it isn't good, in fact I think it is awesome. Cleopatra is a perfect example of a huge budget studio epic. And I mean HUGE budget. For Cleopatra's triumph in Rome, they covered Elizabeth Taylor in gold and paraded her along the streets of a realistic and large looking Rome on a 40 foot tall statue of Anubis being pulled by maybe 30-50 elaborately dressed slaves. This movie was a spectacle designed to draw public attention from television back to the failing studio system. It was received well, but didn't do phenomenally well in the box office and as a result 20th Century Fox was plunged into debt. Wikipedia says it cost the equivalent of $300 million 2007 dollars. Despite all of this I think it is a wholly enjoyable movie to watch.

Emily: Kamala didn't tell me that Rex Harrison would be in this one, his Julius Caesar was a pleasant surprise. Kamala gushed about how much she likes Burton/Taylor movies for like 5 minutes before we started it. Apparently this was their first film together, during the filming of which they fell in love and Liz dumped her husband at the time whose name I forget.

Kamala:Eddie Fisher

Emily: You are a nerd. Anyways it was soooo long. The director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz also directed All About Eve, the first movie we watched. I didn't like this one that much, they kind of tooled with the history and the screenplay was horrible. But, I am glad we watched it because it fits perfectly into our project. Cleopatra is a perfect example of a movie fraught with the problems indicative of the plight of the big studios in the early 1960s. There were conflicts over the casting, directing, editing, costumes, shooting location, and Elizabeth Taylor even became deathly ill and needed a tracheotomy at one point. The film was made with no shooting script and the screenplay in the final version is rumored to be mainly improvisation by the principal actors.

Kamala: I will admit it is a little long. Mankiewicz had trouble with Fox, and there are a few different cuts varying in length. We saw the premiere version that ran 234 minutes. Films like Cleopatra showed the faults of the studio system to budding filmmakers who wanted to be able to preserve their artistic vision. There was this character in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, released in France also in 1963, played by Jack Palance who was every director's nightmare producer, perverting Fritz Lang's austere and beautiful film version of Homer's Odyssey. Independent filmmakers were able to work outside of the constraints of producers like this who were a dime a dozen in the large studios.

Tomorrow we will watch a collection of recently released, small budget short films by William S. Burrows.



you can see her tracheotomy scar in that picture if you look closely

Easy Rider

We both really liked this one. It was produced by Henry Fonda and directed by Dennis Hopper, who also played the leading roles, in 1969. Easy Rider met with a lot of critical acclaim, Dennis Hopper won a prize at Cannes and was nominated for multiple academy awards including Best Supporting Actor for newcomer Jack Nicholson.

We wanted to watch this one first, even though it is kind of a close to the 60's, because it shows what we want to build up to through the 60's. The hostility with which the "freedom," as Nicholson's character says, that Wyatt and Billy represent was met and the great divide between the counterculture and "mainstream" rural life in America show the uncertainty and violence that was present at the dawn of 1970. We want to track the progression of culture to what this film represents.

Kamala: This was great. The cinematography was almost self-consciously arty especially during the acid trip sequence. If anyone has seen My Own Private Idaho, it is pretty obvious that Gus VanSant was pretty heavily influenced by this one with its tracking shots of nature and freeze frames in the acid sequence. For scene changes Hopper used these flickering cuts that would switch back and forth between the new scene and the old three times or so before settling on the new location. He also used a lot of Godard-like angles and chaotic scenes where the focus of the shot changes rapidly from, for example a baton twirler's shoulder to someone's shoe to a tuba player's hat in a scene at a parade.

Emily: The wide angle shots of the American west were unbelievably gorgeous. Also thank god they defined the word "dude" for me, I was so confused. Also, Kamala did not do the LSD sequence justice. It was a visually arresting mishmash of over-exposed shots of the sky above an old New Orleans graveyard, Peter Fonda speaking to a statue of the virgin Mary, Fonda, Hopper and two lady-friends squeezed into this tiny space between two mausoleums talking to the dead, and clips of a woman reciting the Nycene Creed all edited together so quickly as to be almost nauseating. The soundtrack was good too.

Kamala: She already bought it on iTunes. There was this one shot that equated a cowboy shoeing his horse to Wyatt changing a flat on his motorcycle. I thought that was cool.

Emily: Basically what we are trying to get across was that Easy Rider, as opposed to the less mainstream movies we watched from the 50's, was arty. It paid attention to camera angles and actually had a philosophical point.

Kamala: Emily and I disagree on what that point is exactly. I think it was about the anger and resentment that the anti-war and counterculture movements garnered from the rest of America, and the resultant loss of some kind of overarching American identity.

Emily: I thought it was more about a search for personal freedom. More general and less about just America.

Whatever it was supposed to mean, we both recommend Easy Rider to anyone who wants to see a good film.

The 1960's

We are now moving on to the 1960's with the one exception of The Girl Can't Help It, a rock and roll movie from 1956, which Mr. Turner like REALLY wants us to watch.

Independent films and studios flourished in the 1960's especially due to a growing interest in the artistic foreign films that were becoming available in the US. France especially but a lot of Europe had, with the likes of Godard, Buñuel, Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, and others, a very well developed market for arty movies from small studios.


The term "new hollywood" came to describe American directors such as Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Stephen Spielberg who gleaned much in film school from the great foreign directors in the 1960's. This "movement" as we guess you can call it really kind of started with Easy Rider and some other movies in 1969 and flourished in the 70's.

We will look at the sixties back to front, starting with Easy Rider.