Hardly Working

I just saw the Jerry Lewis movie “Hardly Working.” I must saw, I was completely floored. I was instantly reminded of Chaplin’s “Limelight.” Some would say this is an outrageous comparison, but I don’t think so. They are both films wherein great aging clowns take a bitter and poignant look at themselves, and at their lives spent as clowns in the midst of a changing audience and landscape.

Lewis’ film is an abject fantasy about what would happen if he could no longer be a clown. Here is a middle-aged man who has spent his whole life as a clown, and realizes he has no other skills, there is nothing else he can do. So he takes a bunch of odd jobs where he enacts the clown role by default, hilariously causing havoc and chaos everywhere he goes.

But the genius in the film comes from its “serious” parts. The way he cries when he finds out that he lost his job as a clown, his depression when humiliated by his brother-in-law or mean bosses, etc. There is a strange spirit of defiant anger that runs throughout, from the grotesque depictions of people in the world and their banality and small-mindedness, to Lewis’ occasional bouts of defiance towards authority figures. It’s all about how humiliating and absurd it is to live in the world and have a job, and about all the little moments that make life unbearable.

In this world of unspeakable awkwardness and grotesqueness, women and girls are his allies, and boys and men his enemies. Women and girls laugh at his jokes, seek to help him, find him endearing, and want to grow up to be like him, whereas men and boys find him to be a pathetic loser and try to oust him at every turn. From the young son of the woman he’s dating (“You’re happy to see HIM??”) to his sister’s husband, to his many bosses, males are out to get him, threatened by his affinity with women and animals and jealous of his ability to evade the rules.



When he finally quits his job at the post office (it’s the only job he can hold; as one of the character states, “no one loses a civil service job unless he wants to”), it’s because he has been asked to “take care of” some rabbits that have ended up in the post office, ostensibly by destroying them. The film thus begins with an act in which his partner is a kitten, and ends with him rescuing rabbits.

In one strange scene in the film, he suddenly stops being klutzy and does everything right when he is being watched by a superintendant. Before this he could not touch anything without making it fall over, now he is perfectly in command of himself. There are more “serious” moments, such as when he is gracious and adult when evaluating the performance of his boss. The tables have now turned. Instead of being the lowest scum of the earth, kicked around by everybody, he is now his own boss. And he proves it by delivering the mail dressed as a clown, freeing the rabbits, and quitting his job.



The film ends with him going back to being a clown, and his journey into the abject world of random jobs remains as a dream, a nightmare. It’s as if his perfect performance at his job at the post office was a way of suddenly saying, “All right, the farce is over now. I’m really a professional clown, I’m Jerry Lewis, I’m a physical comedian with full control over my faculties, see, I can do this job if I want to.” It’s like that moment in the dream where you are just about to wake up, or that moment when the actor takes off his makeup and reveals himself to the audience as his true self. But in this case he is taking off one kind of makeup—the clown he’s playing in the film, which is a “non-clown” who’s a regular person—and putting on another kind of makeup, his “literal” clown makeup, in which he can finally be himself—Jerry Lewis!

So we have to wonder: who is Jerry Lewis? Is it the actor-writer-director Jerry Lewis we are looking at, or are we simply watching a character in a movie? We see both at once, and that’s the genius of the movie. It’s an actor watching himself, watching his whole career and also watching the end of a career. As in the move “Limelight,” the wrenching sadness we feel is in knowing the history of his earlier work, and how the ugliness of the world he is depicting is a world in which he can no longer thrive, as a clown from another era who is losing his audience to newer tastes, younger entertainers.



Some of the sight gags in the movie are brilliant and get quite surreal, as in one where he delivers mail to a Goodyear blimp and ends up taking the blimp for a ride, and another where a housewife offers him a beer and the Clydesdale-drawn Budweiser truck drives by and tosses him a six-pack. But in spite of its rampant silliness, the movie is strangely subversive and sad, and is Jerry Lewis’ comic and reflective tribute to his own brilliant career.

Travelogue—Some Film Festivals this Year

Travelogue—Some Film Festivals this Year

Stockholm, Gijon, Torino
Jared and I just returned from a European tour which consisted of Stockholm, Gijon (Spain), and Torino. Quite extraordinary all around. Highlights were meeting Tinto Brass in Torino and talking shop (we may share a distributor, and I told him about how my life was changed by seeing Caligula as a child), the Asturian cider house (and actually everything about Spain and the Spanish), the Italian hyper-intellectual audiences (and of course the food), and the serious (Bergman-fed) Swedes and their formal dinners. We met a lot of interesting and charming people on this trip, including filmmakers, press, sexologists, and cinephiles.

Gijon and Torino honored me with retrospectives, and I was followed around by photographers, who took glamour shots all over, including some in a vintage Mercedes (see below). The Gijon catalogue stated (and I quoted to a shocked audience on opening night), that whereas the character is Peeping Tom used his camera as an aggressive phallus, Anna Biller uses her camera like a "playful, extroverted clit.” {more}



On this tour I found that I am capturing more women. Women in Italy especially loved the movie. I think it’s partly because in Italy there is not a stigma attached to the idea of a glamorous woman. Italy still attaches a spiritual and maternal significance to women's beauty, from the Madonnas in the churches to Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale. But older intellectual men in beautiful suits were also nodding appreciatively when I spoke about gender, and everyone clapped when I said that I don’t think strong women should be like men. The Italian audience was the most educated and intellectual audience I’ve ever played to. I bought a number of erotic comic books and “Diabolik” pulps there, which I will write about the next time.

In Sweden we ate at a restaurant that was in a 17th century mansion. The lead actress of “Fanny and Alexander” was there, along with Paul Schrader, a lot of other directors, some writers, and some Swedish dignitaries. We ate herring, reindeer, etc. It was all very formal and old-fashioned. We also went to an ice bar, where you had to be fitted with a special parka before entering in order to not perish of cold. At my screening, the audience was very sad. They were almost pleading with me, “But does it have to be that way for Barbi?” The women especially seemed distressed. Later, the programmer told me that Swedish audiences are sad “because of Bergman.”



Spain was fabulous in every way. The filmmakers, festival people, and press were always in a great mood, ready to drink, play, and talk excitedly in all languages (I spoke mostly French). We ate dinner at 11:00 and were out at nightclubs until 4:00 or 5:00. They were taking pictures like crazy, and I was treated like the movie queen of the festival, which was fun. I am finding that they like to treat people like celebrities in Europe. After all, for all they know I could be quite famous in America! It's the opposite of Los Angeles, where even the biggest celebrities are treated like regular people. Someone in Sweden actually chased after Jared as he was getting into a car to get his autograph!

Moscow
In the summer we showed VIVA in competition at the Moscow Film Festival, which was quite an honor. Moscow is a place where the people are very real, very fierce, very smart, and speak their minds freely. It is a transitional culture, full of generational and aesthetic clashes, and with a large class and economic gap. The women were the best dressed I have seen in any city. They all wear makeup, do their hair, and wear sexy, fitted dresses, skirts, heels, and stockings. The food is fresh, exotic, organic, exciting. Restaurants are the privilege of the rich and of foreigners. The mix of Soviet, capitalist, and antique architecture is breathtaking and surreal. And of course, there’s the famous subway, with its monumental art treasures, bronze statues, art nouveau lighting, and large expanses of marble.

We created a near riot in Moscow with VIVA, which some hailed as a Fellini-like masterpiece, and which one newspaper claimed was a disgrace to the festival and to the nation itself. I think some people there were missing the irony, especially as they never had a sexual revolution. But some people, especially young people, were filled with joy at the the colors and the sexiness of it. (They do love color in Russia)! They do everything big in Moscow: the longest red carpet I have ever seen, lavish parties, all like something out of a 60s movie about rich people. They took thousands of pictures of us, but I don’t have a single one! And we were offered distribution by a Russian distributor (more news on that later).

One day we took a tour of the film studio there, Mosfilm, where all the great Russian classics were shot. We went in a bus with a group of people and saw some wonderful props, costumes, headdresses, sketches, stills, soundstages, automobiles, etc. At the end of it all we were led out to a wooded area where there was music playing and they were roasting a pig and a lamb on spits, and served us lots of salads, wine, etc. It was quite fabulous.

We've also been to Melbourne and Montreal this year, which were both great. The Fantasia Festival in Montreal lead to Canadian distribution, and we will open in various cities in Canada February with different burlesque troupes, including Skin TIght Outta Sight, which will be quite something! In addition, we are opening in Antwerp this month, and I will present VIVA at Brown University and at the George Eastman House in April of next year. See the screenings page for more information.

Melodrama

Almost all movies nowadays are about men and their tasks. Some movies are about women and romance, but those movies tend not to be complex or honest, and they very often leave out the question of the female as a sexual creature with her own primal needs. She is just like a man, only sappier and less in control of her feelings. She is often mediocre and scared, and she needs a man to “fill” her in the worst way. She is not a creature of power and creativity.

If one were to make a study of great moments in film that were satisfying to women, one would have to look no further than the 1940s or 1950s melodrama. This form reached its zenith around 1960, then quickly withered away after that. These movies form a complex picture of women’s psychological needs and fears, and cover such preoccupations as aging, beauty, motherhood, betrayed love, dangerous love, money and sex, women who will do anything for a man, women gone bad for men, women used by men for profit, women who are bad seeds, nymphomaniacs, adultery, shame; basically, all of the most basic emotional concerns of women.

Some of the most interesting from my point of view are those that pose philosophic questions about aging or beauty, such as Mr. Skeffington, A Woman’s Face, Torch Song, Sunset Boulevard, Female on the Beach; those that are about a woman’s ability to be destroyed by wanting love, such as Madame X, Vertigo, Duel in the Sun, Letter to an Unknown Woman, Leave Her to Heaven, The Red Shoes; those that are about woman’s own destructive or otherwise transformative sexual power, such as The Strange Woman, Double Indemnity, Niagara, Gilda, The Killing, The Birds; those that have to do with a woman’s lot in life, such as Aventurera, Madame Bovary, Mildred Pierce, The Hard Way, The Postman Always Rings Twice; and comedies that paint a positive picture of the power of female sexuality, such as all musicals and “comic blonde” farces.

The powerhouses of women’s cinema—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyk, Ida Lupino, Olivia de Haviland, Jennifer Jones, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Irene Dunne, Vivienne Leigh, Myrna Loy, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Tierney, Hedy Lamarr, Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, Jean Simmons, and a whole host of others too numerous to name—were required to play a double standard in all of their roles which was first of all intended to be powerfully sexy, and second, virtuous. Any painted lady, however crass, was required to have a heart of gold if she was to survive the narrative. Actresses had replaced the holy virgin in Hollywood’s new pantheon of cinema gods and goddesses, and they needed to have that touch of the wholesome to drive men mad with desire and also to produce strong identification in women. The result was a cinema world populated by impossibly sexy, beautiful, well-dressed, glamorous, and internally virtuous women, with dulcet voices, the posture and movements of a dancer, and always with the right thing to say.

How I long for those glamorous screen sirens today, looming in shimmering nitrate silver or Technicolor in hand-beaded gowns. I also long for their problems, for the way in which those problems are rooted in social reality, and for the seemingly universal concern that people had for their problems. Their sexuality was of a powerful and seething nature, and they were always fascinating. The screenwriters, directors, producers, the whole Hollywood machine, knew how to maximize a woman’s luring power to the utmost, so much so that if nudity were added to it, it would have been an unbearable cocktail. One only has to try to imagine Duel in the Sun with a nude Jennifer Jones to understand what I mean by that.

The Erotic Witch

I’ve been doing more research on witchcraft lately. The most interesting book has been The World of the Witches, by Julio Caro Baroja. He traces the figure of the witch from classical times to the present. What is interesting is, he says that the rationalist approach, which states that all witchcraft is nonsense and doesn’t exist except in the mind, is “going a bit too far.”

Some of the fascinating ideas in this book include the fact that witchcraft is about REBELLION and the SHADOW SIDE OF THINGS, and that the sympathy or harmony which exists between like things and the antipathy between unlike things is what constitutes MAGIC. Also, magic is connected to DESIRE AND WILL, and a magician can only attack the IRRATIONAL part of an individual.

Other ideas in the book:

LOVE, for the witch, is a consuming passion.

Magic is an answer to the DESPAIR men and women feel at living in a world beyond their control.

There is always an element of SHAM and FRUSTRATED DESIRE that underlies magic.

EROTIC APPETITES pave the way for magical processes.

Witchcraft is one of the most ANTOSICIAL ACTIVITIES.

The devil gets hold of people, and makes them TIRED OF LIFE, or TEMPTS THEM, or CORRUPTS THEM.

The witch elicits reactions of both TERROR and MOCKERY in people.

Another book I read was What you always Wanted To Know About Sex in Witchcraft, *but were afraid to ask, written by Hastur. With a black and white porn photo on every page, the book attempts to describe the reality of sex practices in covens, between sex magic partners, and throughout history. The book contains very little information, and is mostly an attempt to titillate the novice reader and sexual voyeur. (The photo above is the tamest photo I could find from this book).

I also read Anton Lavey’s book The Compleat Witch: Or, What to do when Virtue Fails, which is a treatise on how women can use their innate witchy powers to snare a man. It’s mostly a case of special pleading for classic sex appeal, as he urges women to throw away their pantyhose in favor of stockings, and to wear three-inch spike heels and dresses that look like the drawings of women in cartoons in men’s magazines. He even extols the virtues of slightly stained undergarments, which are supposed to conjure up the lure of the forbidden.

Much of the book is about trying to appear as the opposite type of the man you are trying to seduce, and he compares people to numbers on a clock with dominant types on the top of the clock, submissive on the bottom, thinking types on the right and feeling types on the left. The logic here is very thin, but the book is amusing as a piece of history. It seems that in the early 70s there were simply too many witches, so the book was written to help certain witches to elevate themselves above others, which in this case amounts to pure and simple desirability and seductive power.

It seems that many of the books written to help witches are about helping females to increase their desirability, and that this concept has been around for a long time. The Greek witches were mostly match-makers and makers of perfumes, aphrodisiacs, cosmetics and love potions, and many medieval witches were prostitutes. One of the main functions of witches throughout history has been to assist in love matches for others, and to secure the men they personally desired for themselves. There has always been an erotic element to the witch, mixed with an element of fear.

The renewed interest in the 60s and 70s with witch novels and movies I think can be attributed to a new interest in uncovering everything female. This meant her body, her soul, her desires, her primal powers, her anatomy. Because of a sudden and meteoric loosening of censorship laws, the female became territory to be openly explored, and men lost no time doing exactly this. There was also a renewal of interest in all things pagan and non-western, and a desire to go back to earlier social structures, which included matriarchy and goddess worship. But with the rise of pornography and its relegation to a specialty underground audience, this interest in woman as a special creature died on a cultural level and was never revived. But you can still see it very strongly in texts and films from that period.

“Black magic” is and always has been about the erotic, and about the primal fear of women. This concept of witchcraft and magic is now seen as hopelessly archaic, as modern witches make sweet-smelling potions out of olive oil, anise, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and try to make everyone feel good about themselves with hippy-dippy self-help spells. Its value as a religion notwithstanding, there is always, as Baroja noted, a tragic element attached to these gestures, the desperate attempt to find a solution to the dreariness of living and frustrated desire through the use of magic and spells.

This is the element about witches and witchcraft that I find most interesting: the way that it becomes a last resort when reality fails to provide the necessary hope, and when simple delusions no longer work. The subject as material for a film is difficult, but if treated properly it can be a powerful examination of social ritual and desire.

Witchcraft

On the way to Moscow I read a really interesting book called “Witchcraft,” by Pennethorne Hughes. It was quite inspiring, in that it laid out the history of witchcraft as a religion that was a bastardized form of older pagan religions. I realized after reading it that much of the landscape of The Wicker Man with Christopher Lee must have been taken from this sort of history. In that film, and in this book, it was suggested that in certain isolated pockets in Europe--in Britain especially-- Christianity had never quite penetrated, and there lurked odd folkways and traditions.

It was suggested that in certain places the folkways persisted. The practitioners of these older customs were either simple serfs and country people who continued practicing an older, classical/pagan religion, or neo-Paleolithic peoples around the British isles and in parts of Europe, who were driven back into their caves and forests by medieval invaders. This is apparently where the legends about brownies, fairies, sprites, and leprechauns come from. Fairies were essentially witches, and practiced the same religion. The religion was not a devil-worshipping one, but a pagan one, and much of it was about fertility rites, moon cults, knowledge of medicinal herbs, and spells and sacrifices to make things grow or prosper.

Eventually there were many new converts to this “religion” throughout the middle ages. Conversion was especially popular with women, cynics of Christianity, rebels, intellectuals, heretics, people who wanted free access to sex, etc. Eventually elements of devil-worshipping emerged as the new witchcraft became a parody of Christianity, and that’s when we start having instances of the converts kissing the devil’s ass, signing contracts in blood, mocking Christian rituals, and going to Sabbaths. Somehow reading about the types of people who gravitated towards witchcraft in the middle ages reminded me of the kinds of people practice witchcraft and spells nowadays, or in the hippie culture of the 1960’s.


I was struck by that hippie element when I was reading this witchcraft book and watching The Wicker Man, and it made sense to me why films and books about witches were so popular in the 1960’s. First there is that sense of nature and getting back to basics, then there is the whole woman-power thing, then there is the hippie-dippy new-age spells and magic culture. Somehow the image of Victorian fairies sitting on toadstools and Donovan with his pipe in The Pied Piper blend together in my mind, as well as women selling sachet packets at the Renaissance Faire, shops full of incense and mystic crystals, fantasy art, unicorns, rainbows, gypsy and gothic fashion, massage oils, tattoos, tarot, and everything else associated with the anguished Western person’s desire to break out, or the woman’s desire to become a powerful and sexually desired goddess.



Of course the objects and culture associated with witchcraft and fairies today is quite flaky and in bad taste, which I realize with some horror I am starting to quite enjoy. New-age culture, which I have always detested, has been growing on me lately in quite a natural way. While I was in Melbourne recently, I was squealing over all of these horrible shops containing bad pseudo-Victorian fairy art, giant Carnelian silver rings, driftwood hat-racks, and foil-stamped shiny unicorn boxes. I even bought a “fairy mirror,” and a sort of magical “fairy pendant,” and Jared bought “wizard jewelry.” There is something quite new about it for me, as it’s an area I’ve never gone into, although for many others it must seem quite clichéd. Suddenly I have fresh eyes for new-age and sentimental treasures which I would have scoffed at a month ago. And I am also inspired by fairy-unicorn environments which hold primal girl power, such as the images in Junko Mizuno's drawings.


These objects, though, are informing a narrative, as much as the flowered couch prints and vinyl faux-marble ice buckets informed the narrative of Viva. I’m starting to imagine Jared as a screen wizard in an open robe, with his new wizard jewelry, a thoroughly decadent theater or circus manager who is really the devil (much like Roman in Rosemary’s Baby, or the devil in The Virgin Witch). I think my interest in witches started originally with fairy tales, which I really love, but when I think about making a film about it, it gets quickly perverted into all of these other depressing and all too realistic characters and objects, which is how I see life after all. It’s the realism intruding always, the compromise and the shattering of the mythic replaced by the everyday.

A scene which keeps sticking with me is one in which a naked witch smears herself from her toes to her head with magical ointment, then lays down and has a drug trip which turns into a scary and erotic dream. The ointment that witches used was apparently hallucinogenic, and often caused dreams where they thought they were flying, hence the flying on a broomstick legend. I thought there could be this really erotic scene, with a beautiful black-haired naked witch covered in ointment, writhing around and dreaming wishfully about what would happen at the sabbath.

Esther Williams

I’ve come to be an Esther Williams fan by stages, and it wasn’t until recently that she completely won me over. Strangely enough, when I had the epiphany about her it was in Moscow last week, when I saw “Easy to Love” as part of a series the Moscow Film Festival was having on American Musicals. Naughty me, to go to Moscow and see an American film, but with the jet lag and the stress and the long plane trip, all I wanted was a little mindless amusement, and a few Busby Berkeley water ballet numbers seemed just the ticket to forgetting my troubles.

Perhaps it was partly the delirium of seeing the film as “exotic,” through the eyes of the Russians, that made me realized what a strange and intricate art form the American musical indeed is, and it made me see the whole thing as an elaborate art piece instead of the popular entertainment it was originally intended to be.

In this striking Technicolor gem, Esther Williams goes back and forth between three men. She is aggressive, athletic, and healthy, with no coyness about her: you might almost say she is brazen, but she retains her full femininity and manages to be sexy and yielding at the same time. She is in love with Van Johnson, her workaholic boss that has to be trained to see her charms and be interested in sex, and is courted by her swimming partner, a male tan bodybuilder who is pictured almost exclusively in ridiculous little swimming briefs, and an overly charming nightclub crooner, played by Tony Martin.

Although the script indulges in many innuendos about Esther and her charms, and the camera lingers on her in one skimpy costume after another, including close-ups of stockings, underwear, etc., we somehow get the feeling that the film is about beefcake rather than cheesecake. She deflects the camera’s lurid gaze with her cheerful vitality and good nature, and focuses the audience’s attention instead on her own appetites, which are purely the appetites of the all-American girl, and on her own gaze and manhunt. Of course, this part of the plot is intentionally played for comic effect, but Esther is the girl to pull it off.

There is less water ballet in this film than usual, and more water skiing. Esther is shown to be resolutely strong and athletic, and the film seems to fetishize her ability to do and be anything, much in the way that “A Star is Born” fetishized Judy Garland. And, like Judy, she is given the ultimate vaudeville honor: she gets to perform in CLOWN DRAG. This number tests Berkeley’s outrageous talent for pushing the boundaries of taste almost too far.

Reminiscent of the deleted cornfield scene in “The Wizard of Oz, which utilized Bolger’s rubbery skills to the maximum in gravity-defying feats of movement, Berkeley combines Williams’ natural talents with absurd and impossible flights. In water-proof clown white with red rubber nose and curly wig, she bounces onto lilypads, does somersaults in the air, is chased by a fake alligator with snapping jaws, and seems to fly as well as swim. At the end of the scene, in a stroke of genius, she has a serious talk with her massive-shouldered fiancé (John Bromfield) in his tiny shorts, still in her grotesque makeup. In her tenderest scene, she rejects this man not as a woman, not even as a person—but as a scary, wet clown.


In ensuing scenes, we see Tony Martin become subtly feminized as he woos a roomful of elderly ladies with his relentless crooning (almost every song in the film is sung by him alone!), Van Johnson eating supper alone like an old maid, and the bodybuilder guy always in his little shorts, always more undressed and more ridiculous than anyone else onscreen. The sense of the men as objects of Williams’ desire is enhanced by her polymorphous flitting from one to the other, and by her sunny resiliency regarding love, fate, and the male flavor of the evening.

Esther Williams is a lady the in the best sense, who personifies strength and health in gender construction. Her pleasure in her craft and in being alive is apparent, and when she mugs, swims, dances, makes love, dresses and undresses, and clowns for the camera, she does not appear to be in the service of male needs or commands, but only of her own desires. She is an unabashedly female 1950’s type, strong and feminine, maternal and tomboyish, and totally without self-deprecation, that I very much miss in culture and in women today. In my next film I plan to feature women like this, women who have hips and brains and know how to use them, but that are before the time when we had to fear them and apologize for their power.

Circus Sex Witch

I've been reading some very strange pulp novles about witchcraft, for research on my new script. The strangest one was "For the Witch, a Stone," by Salambo Forest, 1971. It's sort of a porn novel with sex scenes described in disturbingly vivid detail, where a woman tries LSD and it unlocks her innate supernatural powers. She can now materialize and dematerialize at will, and see into the thoughts of humans and animals (such as segulls on the beach). It's really a flaky, terrible sort of book, but it was so odd that it affected me quite a bit. A lot of new-agey stuff about ESP, psychic powers, etc. And the sex scenes are really awful. There's so much description of balls: "hard cool balls slapping softly," or "the loose plushness of his balls." Graphic and real in a 70's sort of way. Tells it like it is.

Another one, written ten years earlier so much more demure, is called "Love Cult," Jan Hudson, 1961. It's about a so-called witch's coven in Los Angeles, and a hard-boiled guy with an occult bookstore who gets it on with the beautiful dames involved. This guy ends up exposing witchcraft as a hoax, only effective because it preys on the victim's mind. It's got great expositional dialogue that sounds very noir, and you can really imagine some of those noir actors in the roles, or even Ava Gardner, Alexis Smith, etc. This period is more interesting to me right now, the early 60's, for its restraint and the seething sexuality underneath things.

Yesterday I looked all over for notes I'd written for a circus horror witch film. All I could remember is there were some trapeze artists in it, some murders, a castle, and a black cat named Patch. I didn't find the notes, so I'm going to start again from scratch. If there are murders in the circus, they should be committed by a woman. It would be sort of a remake of "Berserk," (Italian title "Blood Circus," see images in this post), but I would have to put thematic elements in to make it more than just an exploitation shocker. She could be some kind of a witch. She could kill with her eyes, with potions, she could make animals crazy. The same scenario would work with in a carnival, set in cheap carnival trailers, tents, diners, and motel rooms.


When I look over these plots I know they're going to sound so stupid to people, that they won't take them seriously. But I have such a penchant for the absurd, the tacky, and for certain kinds of shocking bad taste. Maybe it's because my parents had such good taste, and bad taste seems sort of taboo to me. My mom made all of these beautiful clothes for her store, and even great shirts for my dad. There was never any polyester, no food from a can, no carpets, no pop culture, no elevator music. It's as if I grew up in a terrarium where only beautiful things were allowed, and it's made me isolated from the middle American landscape. I'm trying to get all of that back--the roots of tacky that were withheld from me in childhood.

What's frustrating is that when I try to do bad taste, it comes out as good taste. I try to design hideous sets, and they come out like Technicolor dream worlds and fairybook rooms. It's the good taste underneath, transforming Roger Corman into Ptushko. Much of it comes from the dark and irrational side of myself, but I'm always striving to make my films less arty and more popular. I'm coming to the popular by degrees, and I'll be interested in seeing at what point the artiness vanishes so that only the popular remains. Not that I want to sweep the insanity away completely, just to contain it more, put it more into external things like plot.

I'm a bit afraid to do horror, as I think whatever I would do would come out too scary even for me. But I'm fascinated to try.