5/6/23
Newsletter #328
The Crack of Dawn
Every time I went to New Zealand to work on Hercules and Xena I first had to get a New Zealand work permit. I would go to the New Zealand consulate in L.A. and they would ask, “How long will you be working there, mate?” I’d say, “A month,” or I’d say, “Three months,” and they would paste the appropriate permit in my passport. If I needed to stay longer, someone in the production office would handle it and get me an extension.
In Bulgaria, where I made two films, they don’t have work permits. For 30 days you can do anything you damn well please: vacation, work, invade the nearby Crimean Peninsula, they don’t care. At the end of 30 days, go home. Seriously, Bulgaria has no proper way to extend your stay should it be necessary. In the case of directing full-length movies, it was necessary in both cases. The method the studio used, which, as I understood it, wasn’t exactly legal, was apparently the only way to do it. On day 29 or 30 they would drive me about fifty miles west to Serbia. We would cross the border, pull a U-turn, then cross right back into Bulgaria, only now I had a new, dated visa stamp in my passport that gave me 30 more days. Apparently, you could do that as many times as you wanted.
The only comic books I ever liked were Zap Comix in the very early 1970s. I had every one of them. I eagerly awaited new issues. All the artists and writers were good, and dirty, and funny, but the man at Zap Comix was Robert Crumb. Although I know he would hate to be introduced this way, he is best remembered for Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural and Keep on Truckin’. While I was just in San Francisco, I went to the famous, beatnik bookstore, City Lights, and purchased two new printings of Charles Bukowski books with R. Crumb covers, which I think is a perfect combination. I just wish that Crumb had actually illustrated the whole books.
The documentary, Crumb (1994), is an extraordinary film, and I’ve seen it many times (though not in a decade). Directed by Crumb’s buddy, Terry Zwigoff, it not only gets you to really understand Robert Crumb, who is an extremely weird, wonderfully talented artist, but you also get to meet his family, his mother and two brothers. And as you meet each relative, you come to realize that Robert is the normal one. After meeting his zany mother, you then meet his completely insane, but utterly charming, elder, 50-year-old brother Charles, who hasn’t left bedroom in decades, and died a week after they finished filming. It was Charles who got Robert into drawing comic books, and Charles was pretty good. In a brilliant sequence, Robert takes you through Charles’ old comics that he drew as a teenager, as he went crazy. Charles’ comics are primarily based on the Disney live-action film, Treasure Island (1950), with Bobby Driscoll and Robert Newton. That’s the version I saw at the theater as a kid and it’s great. So, as Robert Crumb explains, and the drawings clearly show, Charles goes insane. All of the characters develop rings of flab around their bodies, and the dialogue increases in the word balloons. As you keep going the rings of flab multiply until everybody sort of looks like the Michelin man, and there is so much dialogue that it neither begins nor ends, just completely fills the balloon. Charles had a total breakdown, never drew another comic, went into his bedroom and never came out.
All right, everybody’s got a weird relative or two, right? But then we meet Robert’s younger brother, Maxon. When we visit him in his San Francisco apartment, he is seated in yoga position on a board of nails. Maxon has pounded perhaps 50 nails through a three-foot square piece of plywood and is seated on the pointy ends. Simultaneously, he has ingested a ten-foot rope of cloth that he is allowing to digest. Part of it is hanging out the side of his mouth, and the other part, we are told, is hanging out of his tuchus. Maxon tells us that he does this regularly to cleanse himself.
I haven’t seen the film in years, but it really stuck with me. And it’s one of those magical documentaries that had they waited a week or two longer, they wouldn’t have gotten the interview with Charles. And though Charles hasn’t left his bedroom in about 30 years, and is missing half his teeth, he seems perfectly happy, and highly amused.
Actually, the first time I saw Crumb’s artwork, as did many others, was the cover for Cheap Thrills, Janis Joplin’s first record. Everybody loved it, and it made Crumb famous. I spent hours studying it. It’s also Crumb’s only album cover. Many bands came to him after Cheap Thrills, including the Rolling Stones, and he turned them all down. I love his artwork and his attitude, and he’s always inspired me. I’m glad he got hooked up with Bukowski’s books.
As we said on the set of Evil Dead, which was 10 weeks of night shoots, in regard to the approaching dawn, “Here come the blue gels.”
Good on ya, mates.