Movies Round Midnight
My mother wasn’t actually thrown out of the theater, she left voluntarily. I went with her to see How The West Was Won when it opened at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in 1963. The film was a Cinerama wide-screen epic that became the second highest grossing movie that year hauling in slightly less than Cleopatra. How The West Was Won was an overblown, soulless frontier saga with a huge cast and consisted of five segments, one of which was The Rivers. The climatic scene in The Rivers focused on a petite Debbie Reynolds aboard a hulking 30-foot long raft which she maneuvered with a flimsy pole through a wild and dangerous series of boulder-strewn rapids.
The scene had taken 7 days to shoot on location and must have been a logistical nightmare to capture with the triple cameras used in filming Cinerama productions. The end result came with blaring sound effects and a frantic Debbie spread across the massive wrap-around screen and had the audience tugging at their armrests. My mother found it less convincing. Little Debbie's herculean effort struck my mother as so ludicrous that she was overtaken with non-stop raucous laughter. The glares and grumbling of people seated around us only made my mother laugh harder. When we were lit up by an usher's flashlight from the side aisle, my mother really let it all out. Had the usher said anything we wouldn't have heard it above my mother's outburst. We both sensed it was time to exit so she gathered up her things and struggled out to the lobby, howling all the way.
My mother's assessment of Debbie's situation proved to be correct. Many years later I discovered that during the filming of the rapids scene, Miss Reynolds was thrown from the raft and had to be rescued downstream (see below).
Photo from pinterest.com
The theaters nearest to where I lived on Mt. Washington that screened foreign films were the Los Feliz on Vermont and the Cinema on Western. In addition to foreign films, the Cinema theater began running experimental films on Saturdays from midnight into the wee hours of the morning. The Cinema had a single big screen in those days and sat a little over 700. Mike Getz managed the theater for his uncle and initiated a program that was called "Movies Round Midnight". Mike was influenced by a local poet named John Fles who had been screening experimental films around Silver Lake and Hollywood since the 1950s in makeshift locations.
The UCLA and USC film schools were ramping up at the time and student films were added to the midnight fare. George Lucas attended the USC film school and one of his student films was shown in 1967 entitled Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB. This same story was the basis for Lucas' first major motion picture and his directorial debut with thx 1138 in 1971.
The Cinema was usually well attended for the midnight movies and the crowd reaction was often better than the films. A typical midnight show would include 10 to 15 short films and a single feature that ran an hour or so. Many of the experimental films were from the prominent independent film makers of 50 years ago such as Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger. Film making technology was still in its infancy. The films were shot with either Super 8 or 16 millimeter; lens apertures were set manually for lighting; there was no auto-focus; there were no computer graphics; animation was freeze-frame and many films had no sound track. Some of the films that were screened were pretty rough to sit through and the audience was quick to voice their criticism. You never knew what was coming up next but if it turned out to be good, the crowd could be counted on to show its appreciation.
One night a short film with no sound that ran only 60 seconds began with a completely black screen. 15 seconds into the film, with the screen still black, the word F-U-C-K appeared in large white block letters. This was a word that was not seen or heard in public through much of the 1960s. The word then slowly faded away leaving the screen black again. Seconds later the letters began throbbing slowly on and off. When the flashing on and off began to speed up like a strobe light, the audience began to shout the word in unison with the screen. The pace of the flashes began to accelerate and the crowd sped up to match it as it reached a furious rate with 500 people roaring "FUCK" at the top of their lungs as fast as humanly possible all the way to the end. I suppose in today's obscenity-laden culture this all seems tame but it was heady stuff back then.
One of the best known experimental film makers was Kenneth Anger. Apparently a copy of one of his films disappeared and he blamed the Cinema theater for the loss. He can be seen below picketing in front of the theater.
Photo from blogs.getty.edu
One night I watched The River which was a 1951 film directed by Jean Renoir. I had seen many films that included a flashback, or a story-within-a-story, a device commonly used in the movies. The River was the first film I had ever seen where the plot evolved into a story-within-a-story-within-a-story. When the protagonist in the second story began telling a third story and it unfolded on the screen, the audience let out a collective "far out!".
It is not my intent to inspire anyone to check out movies made 50 to 70 years ago. With very few exceptions, old movies do not hold up, especially foreign films. The biggest problem is that older movies are tortuously slow compared to the fast pace of current films. Subtitles and outmoded styles of acting make relating to the characters difficult if not impossible. Black and white instead of color can be a distraction for audiences as well. Even films in English that were quite hip when they were released can today put you into a coma. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove which came out in 1964 is a perfect example. Other than brief bits by George C.Scott and Peter Sellers toward the very end, the film is now unbearable to sit through.
A few days after I saw The River, I told Steven Andrews about the film going three levels deep and he was not impressed. He had recently seen a film which went through so many layers that he had lost count. It was a 1964 Polish film called The Saragossa Manuscript by Wojciech Has. He said after a point the audience began complaining loudly as each new layer was introduced and many simply got up and left as the switching continued. Steven said that after a while characters and objects from one story would appear in a later story. Soon stories began to overlap, merge and dissolve into and out of each other producing an incomprehensible montage that was completely disorienting.
The Saragossa Manuscript is a black and white film than runs for 180 minutes. It opens with Captain Alfonso Van Worden, a lone Spanish soldier making his way on horseback from Andalusia to Madrid in 1739 during the Napoleonic Wars. Along the way he stops at an abandoned village, enters the upper floors of a large empty villa where he comes across a manuscript. He is so engrossed in it that he fails to notice an approaching enemy soldier and is taken prisoner. Captain Van Worden asks his captor to translate the text of the manuscript.
Thus begins the peeling away of the first of endless layers with Van Worden matching wits with monks, gypsies, hermits, concubines, sultans, astrologers and officials of the Spanish inquisition.
The interconnecting plot lines are set against many bizarre and surrealistic landscapes.
I tried in vain to find the film after Steven told me about it but it was no longer playing anywhere. Over the next 45 years I often though about the film but never had an opportunity to see it. Up until he passed away, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead would often refer to the movie in interviews as a masterpiece, each time serving to remind me that I had missed out on a vital piece of film history.
It wasn't until around 2010 that our son Michael made me aware the future had arrived and there were any number of ways to get a hold of, or view almost any movie ever made. Michael had been subjected countless times to my bemoaning having missed seeing The Saragossa Manuscript and he insisted I get on with it. I don't recall what means we used to order it but I do remember that it came on about midnight with Michael watching it at his house and me watching it at mine. Michael told me the next day that he had somehow managed to make it through the full 3 hours. I, on the other hand, couldn't stomach more than 20 minutes and went to bed.