Warped Woman

I read this book by Orrie Hitt the other day, "Warped Woman." It's pretty strange. It's about this writer of dime store novels, who is trying to convince his society girlfriend that his writing is noble, because it's about real people and their problems and perversions. He's writing a book about a peeping tom, and she thinks it's a sick subject that should be censored, while he explains that he's benefiting society by exposing a type of psychology that's in their midst.

In the meantime, he has all of these women. Every woman he comes across is a potential sex partner, and he can't be with them without assessing their physical charms and going over in his mind how it was, or would be like, in bed with them. This includes a 40-ish drunk of a floozy landlady, a young blonde waitress with impossible proportions, (40-20-36), his black-haired ivory-skinned girlfriend with almost equally impossibly proportions but even better legs than the blonde, and his beautiful redheaded agent who sleeps with all of her writers and uses business to force them into bed. Out of all of these girls, the one that's considered "warped" is his girlfriend, who won't put out for him. She is an unreasonable, misguided creature, railing against kissing in the cinema, and trying to keep movies of that sort out of the local theaters. They argue incessantly over issues of censorship, where he patiently tries to explain her wrongheadedness to her, but she won't listen.

This all culminates in her burning his books in a mad witchhunt, along with some girlie magazines and other smutty literature, and publicizing the event widely through her newspaper that her rich daddy bought for her. He is proclaimed the most undesirable citizen of the town, and his career is nearly ruined. She is a terrifying harpy spitting out rage, but at the same time still trying to bend him to her will, to get him to marry her, to control his mind, to stop him from writing the things he wants to write, which he equates with truth and humanity, and to get him to write boring small-town drivel.

In the end, she is attacked by the real-life peeping tom of the town, the person that he was basing his book on. He had repeatedly tried to warn her about it and protect her, but she insisted that no such type of person could possibly live in their town, and that his writing was only the product of his sick mind. He arrives just in time to save her, and she is filled with gratitude. She now admits that his writing does a service to society, and she is even in awe of him and his importance. Near the very end of the book we find out why the book is called "warped woman": she tells him that she was caught masturbating in front of her window when the peeping tom discovered her. It's also strongly suggested that she's a lesbian. There's quite a bit of discourse about lesbians in the book, as it's a subject he claims to have extensively studied and written about, not out of prurient interest, but as a social study. Lesbianism is spoken about as a social problem that can be solved by a good family doctor and understanding parents.

There is a statement at the back of the book by the writer, who claims in a kind of emotional rage that he is revealing the types of people who have tried to censor his writing in the past, and their evil motives.

The most striking image in the book is when the peeping tom character has just come back from witnessing a fire, which turns him on even more than peeping into windows. This could become a new obsession for him, setting fires. But what he sees in the flame is the writer's raven-haired girlfriend, her head on a white pillow surrounded by black smoke, and the color red (blood). It's a terrifying image. Another scary moment is when the writer and his girlfriend are fighting at night on the lawn, and she screams at him that he will burn in hell. It's all very violent. It's as if the writer, Orrie Hitt, hated some woman so much for wanting to censor him that he wished death, murder, decapitation, burning, and witchcraft on her.

At the same time, he is defined by all of the women he knows. The writer even claims in the book that if you show him the woman a man sleeps with, he can tell you about that man's soul. So, his soul is defined by all of these women. He is nothing without them. He only exists because of them. That's why he's so hateful towards this one woman, because she has too much power over him. She has become the scary controlling mommy who won't let the boy be himself. He wants the yielding permissive mommies, who are only women by definition of how much they can please him. And the controlling mommy is the wife, any wife really, who tries to tame her man for the sake of civilzation, but ends up crippling him instead.

I know this is the early 1960's, but I wonder how much gender roles and primal emotions have really changed. It's interesting to have it laid out raw and honest like this, instead of buried and coming out all passive-aggressive. It makes me understand men better. I think men have gotten more sneaky since then. They won't admit to needing those things from women anymore, that's how they get out of being controlled by them. But if women could understand their raw emotions better, from books such as these, it might be easier for us get some of that control back, in the form of pretending to fulfill their most secret desires. Does this scare you, men??

The Viva Pressbook

I've just made these great pressbooks that I'm really excited about. I was applying to some European festivals that requested a pressbook and I thought "What is a pressbook?" Usually festivals ask for a press kit, which is just some xeroxes and stills in a folder. So I looked it up and found people selling all of these vintage pressbooks on Ebay from the 60's and 70's. Apparently a pressbook was a glossy printed booklet with anywhere from 2 to 16 pages or so, usually scaled like a newspaper at about 11" x 17", that distributors would send to theater managers to help promote the films. They no longer make them, except in Europe, and the ones they make now are totally different from the vintage ones (the ones now are more like catalogues, very thick, and are only made for very big movies).

I instantly decided that I wanted to make a pressbook like those vintage ones, and although they had great covers, I couldn't get a sense of how they were put together without seeing them in person. I ordered a few, but I was itching to see one right away. I brought it up to my friend Jared and he said he'd just bought a pressbook for the Herschell Gordon Lewis film A Taste of Blood. So we rushed over to his house to get it, and I was completely awestruck by how incredible it looked. The scale was breathtaking, and there was a very stylish design, with only black, white, and orange on the outside, and black and white on the inside. The orange was applied to the black and white photos to look like blood or violence, and the photos on the back were all hacked up in weird shapes, perfect for a horror movie. The inside contained information about the film, such as cast and crew and synopsis, and also ads to be clipped out and sent to newspapers, and different posters that could be ordered. It was gorgeous.

I instantly started to design my pressbook in a similar style, (also incorporating the pressbook cover design for Andy Milligan's The Filthy FIve, which coincidentally I happened to see that evening in a book I was reading), and the result, I have to say, is quite extraordinary. What is amazing is that because of the scale, (12" x 17"), the full-color front and back function as movie posters, and then all the movie information can be placed inside. It's so much less clunky than a folder with stuff inside, and it also can act like a sort of flyer. It's very retro looking, so right away you feel transported back to another time, which is what VIVA does as a movie, so it's perfect.

In the meantime I bought a group of sexploitation pressbooks from the 60's and 70's, and it's obvious how the quality level drops off dramatically after about 1972. They get smaller, are printed on cheaper paper, have less color, and are less remarkable all in all. (Shortly after that they disappeared alltogether). And the ones for sale are mostly for exploitation movies, the kind VIVA was modeled after. It feels very authentic to have the same sort of ad campaign used by the Herschell Gordon Lewis set! This should generate some publicity! Also, I've put clips on the Viva page and the Cast page, and on Youtube. So now it's all public, for better or for worse...