9/8/23
Newsletter #452
The Crack of Dawn
Mick Jagger was once asked what was his favorite Rolling Stones song? He replied, “I hate them all.” Over the years I have been asked many times – particularly when I was regularly attending conventions – which of my films was my favorite? I have a standard response which goes something like this, “My films are my children. Some of them are crippled or blind or retarded, but I love them all equally.” Although none of my films were ever blessed with great success, I have received quite a few good reviews over the years. Even still, I’d say at least 30% of the reviews took a whopping shit on me, and that’s just how it goes. In a negative review of my film Lunatics, the reviewer wrote “. . . the obviously fake giant spider.” My inner response was, “The real giant spider was booked that day, so we had to fake it.”
Anyway, a few days ago I wrote about a series of big, expensive, extremely detailed and accurate, red-covered books (published by McFarland Publishers) that could seemingly only be gotten at Samuel French Bookstore. I have the Wide Screen Movies book and I love it. I also mentioned that there was also another book in the series called Vietnam War Movies that gave my film, Thou Shalt Not Kill . . . Except, the worst review it ever got. Since it was $75 and I didn’t have $75, I didn’t buy it. Well, I just bought it, and it’s here. Thankfully, the review is much shorter than I recall, so that good.
Without further ado, from Vietnam War Movies by Jean-Jacques Malo and Tony Williams, their thoughts on TSNKE. “An incredibly bad, ineptly directed, badly acted, low-budget movie which Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell (of Evil Dead fame) would prefer to forget. As the Charles Manson cult leader, Raimi attempts to combine the acting styles of Edwin Neal’s Hitchhiker in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Jack Nicholson in The Shining. The latter reference occurs when the demented Raimi rides on a motorcycle in the woods screaming, ‘I can’t get out of this maze!’ Shot near Detroit, the Michigan wooded landscape substituting for both Vietnam and Beverly Hills, the film has to be seen to be believed. The music score borrows liberally from the Uncommon Valor soundtrack suggesting that the boys in Nam could have dealt with Charles Manson any day. (Tony Williams).”
It's not nearly as bad as it had become in my memory. Hell, I could even pull a quote for the poster from that review. “. . . the film has to be seen to be believed.”
There is an amazingly negative review of my film Running Time, that I also sadly didn’t buy, that was in one of the big, fat Video Bloodhound books. The reviewer not only didn’t like the film, but personally called me an “asshole.” This was based on a quote of mine from somewhere where I said that Running Time used the shot-in-real-time idea better than Hitchcock’s Rope. I still stand by that quote. As I said at the time, I never would have come up with the idea had it not been for Hitchcock and Rope, but even though Hitchcock thought it up, he didn’t use it correctly. However, I didn’t come up with the brilliant idea of shooting in real-time, Hitchcock did, I just came up with an improvement.
Briefly, if you’re shooting in real-time, then a minute of the movie is actually a minute long. Therefore – in my opinion – time must be the issue. In Rope, two young men have killed another young man, put his body in a chest, then throw a party that includes a cop (James Stewart). There’s no time element. If the box was going to automatically pop open at midnight, that’s a time element. Without that, why shoot in real-time? It’s use in Rope ultimately just makes it boring. In Running Time, where time never stops being the issue – they’ve got to rob a safe and escape before the cops arrive – I believe that real-time creates suspense.
The reviews for Running Time were 90% positive, which was very gratifying. Should it ever break even I would be even more gratified.
The real-time shtick was used again in Sam Mendes’ 1917 (2019), and I got bored pretty quickly. Yes, there is a time element, he needs to get the message through during World War I, but everybody needed to get the message through during WWI. I also just don’t like that actor, George MacKay, who manages to look like a droopy hangdog all the time. Also, at 119 minutes, 1917 truly became interminable. I suspected that the gag wouldn’t hold up that long. Running Time is an extremely lean 70 minutes.
Since I am honking my own horn, when Running Time opened in Los Angeles (the same day as Titanic), I got mostly good reviews from every publication, of which there were many in 1997. In one of them in the LA Reader (stored in a box somewhere), the reviewer observed that I had done something that nobody else had done. I took an idea from Alfred Hitchcock, and one-upped him.
You know what? I did.
Cheers!
Thanks. That was 26 years ago.
I gave him more credit than he was due. My vague memory improved his writing and critical skills.