Blue Movie

Rating:
Summary: The story behind King B's best movie
Review: What if a stag film, one of those cheaply made, low-grade film quality adult boff movies, were made with a big budget, with big name stars, at feature film length? That's what Boris Adrian, a.k.a. King B or simply B, a well-respected star director who's won Oscars with his revolutionary and visionary styles who has entered a creative drought for the past two years, wonders aloud to Sidney Krassman, his gross, hefty, and profane producer after an evening spent watching stag films at the home of eccentric, vivacious, multi-handicapped Teeny Marie.

Sid gets three million dollars for production costs. Yes, Boris's movie will be made, but the proviso that it will be filmed and exclusively exhibited in Liechtenstein, that postage stamp sized principality sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, with the government providing the funding. That would be a boon to a country with the lowest per capita income in Western Europe.

The movie, titled The Faces Of Love, is to be an anthology of erotic love, of twenty-five minute segment stories. Getting the budget money, and production crew is no problem. What about the performers? To that end, Boris procures Angela Sterling, an actress clearly based on Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield, and America's top draw, someone who wants to be seen as more than just a T&A actress, the French lesbian actress Arabella, and prim but pretty British actress Pamela Dickensen. The only big trouble may come from Angela Sterling, who is also the mistress of Les Harrison, vice president of Metropolitan studios, and whose presence on Boris's movie was the result of a breach of contract from a movie funded by Metropolitan. The movie would take advantage of some recently lifted restrictions and challenge some movie taboos, with each story representing a theme such as miscegenation/multiple partners, the first experience, which is a lesbian one, a priest and a hooker, and brother with sister.

As this was written in 1970, four years after the demise of the notorious and increasingly irrelevant Hays Code and two years after the imposition of the MPAA ratings, Blue Movie is well-placed, coming out at the dawn of a brief newfound cinematic freedom.

Sprinkled with lots of four-letter words, mostly by Sid, with plenty of explicit passages and even a few chapters, funny characters such as Feral, a Senegalese extra whose equipment gets many reactions, Tony Sanders, the writer who's a veritable goofy but creative genius, and of course Sid, who's crass, vulgar, but funny. He tells a topless and quite chesty waitress, "Do you have a cold?" When she asks him what makes him think that, he says, "Oh I don't know why. Your chest looks all swollen." Boris's laid back, thoughtful personality makes him a pretty appealing character. The bash at big studios is apparent. Some chapters depict the actual shooting and discussion of scenes in the film, special apparati used in adult scenes, which film buffs may appreciate.

The book ripples with the usual irreverence Southern gives, outdoing The Magic Christian and Candy, two novels that were done as movies.

Which brings me to this: if Blue Movie had been made into a film back in 1970, I'd put Peter Fonda as King B, Vic Tayback (Mel from the Alice series) as Sid, Mamie Van Doren as Alice, Jeanne Moreau as Arabella, and Robert Wagner as Les Harrison. And as Pamela was described as someone resembling Susannah York, why not? And of course change the bummer ending. That'd be something.

Rating:
Summary: The story behind King B's best movie
Review: What if a stag film, one of those cheaply made, low-grade film quality adult boff movies, were made with a big budget, with big name stars, at feature film length? That's what Boris Adrian, a.k.a. King B or simply B, a well-respected star director who's won Oscars with his revolutionary and visionary styles who has entered a creative drought for the past two years, wonders aloud to Sidney Krassman, his gross, hefty, and profane producer after an evening spent watching stag films at the home of eccentric, vivacious, multi-handicapped Teeny Marie.

Sid gets three million dollars for production costs. Yes, Boris's movie will be made, but the proviso that it will be filmed and exclusively exhibited in Liechtenstein, that postage stamp sized principality sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, with the government providing the funding. That would be a boon to a country with the lowest per capita income in Western Europe.

The movie, titled The Faces Of Love, is to be an anthology of erotic love, of twenty-five minute segment stories. Getting the budget money, and production crew is no problem. What about the performers? To that end, Boris procures Angela Sterling, an actress clearly based on Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield, and America's top draw, someone who wants to be seen as more than just a T&A actress, the French lesbian actress Arabella, and prim but pretty British actress Pamela Dickensen. The only big trouble may come from Angela Sterling, who is also the mistress of Les Harrison, vice president of Metropolitan studios, and whose presence on Boris's movie was the result of a breach of contract from a movie funded by Metropolitan. The movie would take advantage of some recently lifted restrictions and challenge some movie taboos, with each story representing a theme such as miscegenation/multiple partners, the first experience, which is a lesbian one, a priest and a hooker, and brother with sister.

As this was written in 1970, four years after the demise of the notorious and increasingly irrelevant Hays Code and two years after the imposition of the MPAA ratings, Blue Movie is well-placed, coming out at the dawn of a brief newfound cinematic freedom.

Sprinkled with lots of four-letter words, mostly by Sid, with plenty of explicit passages and even a few chapters, funny characters such as Feral, a Senegalese extra whose equipment gets many reactions, Tony Sanders, the writer who's a veritable goofy but creative genius, and of course Sid, who's crass, vulgar, but funny. He tells a topless and quite chesty waitress, "Do you have a cold?" When she asks him what makes him think that, he says, "Oh I don't know why. Your chest looks all swollen." Boris's laid back, thoughtful personality makes him a pretty appealing character. The bash at big studios is apparent. Some chapters depict the actual shooting and discussion of scenes in the film, special apparati used in adult scenes, which film buffs may appreciate.

The book ripples with the usual irreverence Southern gives, outdoing The Magic Christian and Candy, two novels that were done as movies.

Which brings me to this: if Blue Movie had been made into a film back in 1970, I'd put Peter Fonda as King B, Vic Tayback (Mel from the Alice series) as Sid, Mamie Van Doren as Alice, Jeanne Moreau as Arabella, and Robert Wagner as Les Harrison. And as Pamela was described as someone resembling Susannah York, why not? And of course change the bummer ending. That'd be something.

Rating:
Summary: More interesting for its 1970s mindset than anything else.
Review: X-rated movies could be respectable. That was the thinking of the late, legendary director Stanley Kubrick when he went to work on the last movie before his death, the R-rated "Eyes Wide Shut."

"Eyes" remains both intriguing and perplexing to me, mostly because it turned out to be such a mess. Like Jay Leno said, it was probably the only movie where the nudity was confusing.

What was the point?

Tom Cruise had sex with his then-wife, didn't have sex with two women at a party, didn't have sex with a prostitute, didn't have sex with the daughter of a patient, didn't have sex with the daughter of a shop owner, didn't have sex at an orgy, didn't have sex with the prostitute's roommate, and so on and so forth.

I watched this flick with a couple friends and when it was over, one of them said, "I didn't go to the bathroom, I didn't go get a drink. I didn't leave the room, and I still don't know what was going on!"

Since "Shut" came out three years ago (my God, how time flies), I've tracked down the translation of the book upon which it was based (Arthur Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle," or, "Dream Novel"), as well as a screenwriter's Kubrickian memoir of the work on "Shut" ("Eyes Wide Open," by Frederic Raphael).

I remain confused.

But recently, I heard about another book that might shed a little light on the subject: Terry Southern's 1970 novel, "Blue Movie."

Southern, the screenwriter behind Kubrick's 1964 comedic masterpiece "Dr. Strangelove," wrote "Blue Movie" as his imagining of the director's desire to do an X-rated picture with huge celebrities and fantastic, artful lighting and cinematic breakthroughs.

Otherwise short on Kubrickian insights, Southern dedicates the work "for the great Stanley K.," and even has two characters who could be fictional versions the K-man. One is celebrated director King B., or Boris, who is looking for the next thing to astound audiences with; the other is weaselly producer Sid Krassman.

Hollywood of the 1960s gets satirically skewered, as Sid and Boris get it in their heads to do exactly what Kubrick dreamed: Make a pornographic film (a blue movie) with celebrities and cinematic triumphs, one that will be shocking to and maybe even respected by the industry.

What follows is explicitly graphic madness. The game plan is to make "The Faces of Love," an episodic movie about the different kinds of love.

As a hot-shot screenwriter character sums them up, idyllic, profane, lesbian, incestuous, sadism, masochism, nymphomania ... in case you didn't figure it out from the opening line of this review, this is not a novel for the genteel. (A customer review on Amazon.com ponders, is this book the dirtiest ever written?)

Big name stars are called in, and the technical, ahem, kinks are worked out, although trouble is always just around the bend.

Both Sid and Boris are never really fully realized; they mostly plot their movie or (more often) how to get their actresses into the sack. Southern stretches them as far as they will go, but that's not a great distance.

The most intriguing character is Tiny Marie, a loudmouthed, profanity-spewing midget who runs around on the set of Sid's other X-rated films. But even she is only semishocking in this day and age. Southern does have some rather eye-opening moments, but it fails to be earth shattering.

The story's all right, but what really makes "Blue Movie" so interesting and worthwhile is the way it's so ahead of its time. (Perhaps one day, a movie based on "Blue Movie" will be made.)

Many of the things Southern talks about and portrays as film taboos (as they were in back in 1970) have come true, and rampant even on television. The technical aspects of porn, full-fledged female nudity, oral sex É Entertainment Weekly magazine even recently ran an article on how some legitimate foreign flicks were showing actors having actual sex. It just goes to show how far the American mindset has come.

Depending on your interests and beliefs, this can be either a good thing or a bad thing.

In the end, Kubrick might have been much better off making a movie out of "Blue Movie." The characters and their motivations are much clearer, and one doesn't require Cliffs Notes or anything in order to get through the book.

At the very least, here the nudity makes sense.

And in the end, that's really all I ask.