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Entertainment Weekly (April 22, 1994)
HEIRESS HUMAN
Actress Patty Hearst
by Frank Lovece
Patty Hearst was beaten, traumatized, and
berated. Torture by the Symbionese
Liberation Army? No, by Kathleen Turner, who
as the titular Serial Mom bludgeoned the
newspaper heiress to death in her role as
"Juror No. 8."
It's a living. In fact, now that Hearst has
done Serial Mom and Cry-Baby and a radio
call-in voice for an episode of
Frasier, this is her only living. "I guess you
could classify me as a 'homemaker,' whatever
that is these days," Hearst says. "But my
real-life job would be, in fact, making movies."
She laughs. "Look, I've worked more than
some people!"
Indeed, as a card-carrying member of the
Screen Actors Guild, she gets paid and
everything. "That's the kind of dumb question
my father asks me," says the wry heiress.
"'They do pay you, don't they?' 'Uh, yeah,
Dad. I wouldn't have taken anything, but the
union insisted.'"
Hearst, 40, is actually a veteran of pictures.
Sort of. Before making her film debut in 1990's
Cry-Baby, playing Traci Lords' crossing-guard
mom, she had made headlines as the
notorious "Tania," the beret-wearing bank
robber of surveillance photos taken in 1974
after she'd joined forces with her radical-
activist kidnappers.
Those stop-action frames ended up serving as a kind of screen test. Hearst was in Cannes with Paul Schrader, who'd directed the biopic Patty Hearst (1988), starring Natasha Richardson, when John Waters approached her at a cocktail party. "He said he wanted to put me in one of his movies, and I thought, 'Yeah, right. Like I'm at Schwab's drugstore sipping a soda. Please.' But then a year later he called and said here's a script, and come in and read." And today? She has head shots and her SAG card, and is looking for an agent. "I recommend waiting tables, though, over
what I went through," she cautions. "Mine is more of a don't-try-this-at-home-kids entree into the acting community."
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Entertainment Weekly (October 2, 1992)
AND HE ALWAYS HAD FINAL CUT
Joe Pesci's Barber Days
by Frank Lovece
Artistry grows from many seeds. Chekhov's years as a physician, for instance, undoubtedly informed his later work as an incisive observer of the human condition. To see how Joe Pesci's longtime experience as a barber influenced his second career, we spoke to several people who had their hair cut by Pesci in the 1960s and '70s:
At Mike's Barber Shop in Belleville, N.J., Pesci's earliest work adhered to prevailing convention. In the late '60s, that meant "the DA haircut, with long sides and the short top," recalls former customer Tony Carrino, now a Newark city councilman. Gradually, though, Pesci progressed to a more refined sense of aesthetics. By the early '70s he had opened his own salon in Nutley, N.J. — dubbed "Studio 548" (the building's address). "That was the time of 'styling,'" remembers ex-client John Alati, now a business consultant, "when blow-dryers came in. He was into the styling when I used him."
Even in the tonsorial arena, a perceptive observer could sense Pesci's attraction to the spotlight. Mike's, Carrino says, "was a neighborhood place, where there were always people telling stories. And Joe, he was the best of the storytellers."
"Joe would always interrupt the cutting of hair to act out a story or tell a joke or practice his routines," adds former client Ron DeVito, an art director. "Took a long time to get a haircut, though."
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Entertainment Weekly (August 12, 1994)
TEARS OF 'THE CLOWN'
by Frank Lovece
Schindler's List, clearly, is the most famous film about the Holocaust. The strangest is almost forgotten today — Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried.
A Holocaust drama by the auteur of The Nutty Professor? Remarkably, yes. Filmed mostly in Stockholm in 1972, the film stars Lewis, who also directed, as a circus clown imprisoned for satirizing Hitler. After finding himself in a boxcar taking a group of children from a prison camp to Auschwitz, he's forced to distract the terrified youngsters on their way to the gas chambers.
The film will probably never be released — at least in its entirety. After a dispute over financing between Lewis and the French producer, Nathan Wachsberger, most of the film was seized by the studio, Europa Films. However, Lewis has assembled a rough cut on video and shown portions of it privately. Some of those few who have seen it suggest it's the Heaven's Gate of the Holocaust, with Lewis, despite all efforts and an affecting script, essentially doing his shtick.
But at last. some of this strange Day may see the light: A French documentary producer has gathered and wants to use several minutes of footage from the movie. Meanwhile, U.S. producer Michael Barclay and distributor August Entertainment, who own the rights to the original 1961 script, say they're "on the verge" of producing it without Lewis. August president Gregory Cascante has talked to William Hurt about the role of the clown. "When I read this script, I was crying like a baby," Cascante says. "It's about the importance of children and a superficial man who finds his soul because of them."
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Entertainment Weekly (August 9, 1991)
ON VIDEO ONLY
by Frank Lovece
Fatal Pulse. Dead Women in Lingerie. The Life and Times of the Chocolate Killer. You've probably met them in the video store: movies you never heard of, movies nobody you know has watched, movies that have never even seen the inside of a theater. What are those things?
Some, maybe most, are so bad no theatrical distributor would touch them. Others are the victims of bankrupt producers or of the stranglehold the major studios have on the nation's multiplexes. Still others are oddities: film-festival winners too quirky for the mainstream, vanity productions too quirky for anybody, or horror- erotic thrillers just quirky enough for a $2 rental. They have a life, of sorts, all their own. "To shoot a movie directly for video is kind of weird," admits low-budget thriller producer Andy Ruben, who with his wife and partner, director Katt Shea Ruben, made the direct-to-video Dance of the Damned (1988). "Video stores have needed so much product that the market is flooded with horrible made-for-video releases. People in prison wouldn't watch them." But not all direct-to-video fare is that bad: Los Angeles Times reviewer Kevin Thomas called Ruben's own Dance of the Damned an "elegant, poignant, and distinctive vampire film." So there.
As cult-film fans have long known, Z-grade movies can have hidden strengths, including unusual stars such as Wings Hauser and Cynthia Rothrock, as well as non-mainstream points of view that big-budget producers are often hesitant to handle. Here are the major forms of this curious subgenre:
SO BAD THEY'RE UNRELEASABLE
This is the quintessential category of direct-to-video. Of the several hundred movies made in the U.S. each year, many, inevitably, are rotten. If the movie has been backed by a major studio, it's almost always released to theaters anyway — witness Hudson Hawk. But if it's made by a small independent at the mercy of outside distributors, it's video bait — even if it stars a cinematic legend.
Orson Welles in his later years had pretty much become a parody of himself, starring in TV commercials and even narrating a heavy-metal album. It helped if the proffered work could be done close to his home in Las Vegas, and such was the case with 1979's Canadian-made Hot Money a.k.a. Never Trust an Honest Thief, The Great Madison County Robbery, and Going for Broke — all one and the same film.
In this barely acknowledged action-comedy caper (virtually always left out of Welles filmographies and even the most authoritative film reference texts), Welles roundly emoted as a Smokey and the Bandit-style sheriff chasing free-spirited bank robber Michael Murphy. Also starring has-been singer Bobby "Boris" Pickett ("The Monster Mash"), the movie was so awful that it went unreleased for nine years before Vidmark let it loose in 1988.
"It just didn't work," admits producer Zale Magder, who finished directing the movie under the pseudonym Selig Usher when the original director walked off and insisted his name be removed. "The picture had to be recut several times, about 50 percent had to be reshot, and the director just sort of bowed out." Hot Money was a comedy, but, Magder says with a sigh, "it turned out to be a horror to make." And to watch.
CASUALTIES OF BUM LUCK
Lorimar Television produces about a dozen TV series every year, among them highly successful shows such as Dallas, Knots Landing, Full House and Perfect Strangers. Not surprisingly, the company expanded into movies in the mid-'80s, turning out such forgettables as Orphans and Made in Heaven. Yet Lorimar Motion Pictures made one movie that held promise. The director, Richard
Marquand, had just come off the hits Return of the Jedi and Jagged Edge. The initial script was by now-pricey screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. The inspired casting had
Bob Dylan playing a retired, reclusive rock star, with then hot pop singer Fiona as his rising young protégée. Initially titled Rocker and eventually called Hearts of Fire, it looked like it couldn't miss. But the film had problems.
A second writer, Scott Richardson, was brought in. Producer-director Marquand died during postproduction. Then Lorimar Motion Pictures closed down and in 1989 was bought out by Warner Bros., which finally released called Hearts of Fire on video last year to the delight of Dylan devotees and hardly anybody else.
ALMOST FOREIGN MOVIES
These are not the "foreign films" they show in art houses — they're English-language movies with American stars that just happen to have been shot abroad. So for action-movie fans wondering how they missed Jurgen Prochnow in 1985's Killing Cars when it played in theaters, the answer's easy: It played in German theaters. So did Red Heat — not the James Belushi-Arnold Schwarzenegger one but the Linda Blair-Sylvia Kristel one. It's another of the indefatigable Blair's women-in-prison epics. This time she's an American student who goes to Europe to be with her fiancé, a U.S. soldier. She witnesses the abduction of a defector, is nabbed herself, and — oh, never mind. Filmed in West Germany in 1984, it came to video in 1988, the same year the other Red Heat played theatrically. As if that weren't confusing enough, both are distributed on video by LIVE. The resemblances, however, end there. The Schwarzenegger movie's merely bad.
VICTIMS OF FAILED PRODUCERS
Major studios don't usually have this problem, Heaven's Gate notwithstanding. But when financing dries up for an independent producer, works in progress can be abandoned at any stage. This leaves the prints, negatives, soundtrack, and other tangibles up for grabs by investors, banks, completion-bond companies, or even film-storage warehouses. Sometimes another producer will swoop in to buy whatever's left, add narration and some new or stock footage, and release it to video, as Roger Corman did with Let It Rock, starring Dennis Hopper. Or sometimes a developing lab will just hold onto it for a quarter-century.
In 1959, low-budget schlock auteur Edward D. Wood Jr. made the horror film Night of the Ghouls. A sequel of sorts to his Bride of the Monster (1955) and the immortal Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), it starred Criswell, Kenne Duncan, and Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson in a tale of a phony medium who claims he can contact the dead and accidentally manages to wake a grouchy few, to his regret. But Wood ran out of money.
"Ed Wood would scrape together enough to make a film," explains distributor Wade Williams, "but not enough to pay the lab for developing and printing, so there was a 'lab lien' against [the negative], plus storage charges." Wood reportedly had at least two prints struck for Southern California test screenings, but they were lost. In the early '80s Williams managed to find the film lab, paid off the back charges — "discounted," he notes — and bought the rights from Wood's heirs. Ghouls went straight to video on the Nostalgia Merchant label in 1984 — 25 years after Wood made it and six years after he died. Wood had unwittingly lived up to the movie's alternate title: Revenge of the Dead.
MEANT FOR VIDEO ALL ALONG
Drive-ins and double features spawned a boom in B movies and exploitation
flicks in the '50s. But they're gone, and with major studios releasing big-budget Bs like Terminator 2 and sweeping up 2,000-plus theater screens at a time, budget-movie makers have found themselves a new venue: the video store.
Blood Cult, a sludgy slasher film shot in 1985, is generally considered the first such made-for-video feature. Movies had gone straight to video before, but against their will. This one went gleefully.
It came about when Bill Blair, the affable head of the Tulsa, Okla.-based United Home Video, asked himself, "Why pay an advance of thousands of dollars for a film, when we can just about make one ourselves for the same amount of money?" He dusted off an old script he'd co-written with a doctor friend and raised $75,000. The movie was shot on video with Sony Betacams, an early type of camcorder, and directed by Christopher Lewis (son of Loretta Young), then the host of an afternoon talk show at the local CBS affiliate.
"We just met one time and talked very briefly about it," says Blair, "and the next thing we knew we were making movies." United itself has gone on to produce about a dozen made-for-video movies, all but the first two shot on film; one, Revenge (1986), features John Carradine in what United dubiously bills as his 500th movie. Since then, other video companies have begun acquiring made-for-video fare from independent studios such as Full Moon Entertainment (Puppet Master) and Roger Corman's Concorde Pictures (Dance of the Damned).
The B movie, it seems, has now become the V movie.
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Entertainment Weekly (June 25, 1993)
THE WAY THINGS MIGHT HAVE BEEN
Ike on Tina
by Frank Lovece
How does it feel to be America's newest national villain? Throughout Ike and Tina Turner's 18-year marital and musical partnership, most people never saw beneath the vinyl — never suspected that the husband who backed his wife with such fervor on stage could be giving her the back of his hand at home.
The 1986 release of her autobiography, I, Tina, and Ike's two drug convictions in 1988 and 1990 first established his unsavory reputation, and now What's Love etches it on celluloid. We asked the 61-year-old Turner, who says he has never read his ex-wife's damning book, and who doesn't plan to see the movie, how he feels about it all:
Q: What's Love Got to Do With It shows you abusing Tina pretty brutally. What's your take on that?
A: I'm not ashamed of nothing I did with her. The only time I ever hit her with my fist was that last fight we had, in the car, when she put her knee up in my chest. All the other times, there may have been slaps and stuff like that, but I didn't abuse her. She said I broke her jawbone, but I didn't. I slapped her going out of the door, because she screamed at me and said, pardon the expression, "Well, f--- it!" And I slapped her backhanded.
Q: The film also shows you walking into her dressing room after the divorce and threatening her with a gun.
A: Bulls---. But it's like you needed a gun! One time I walked into the dressing room, Tina had some guy picked up against the wall and was punching him! She is nothin' what you think she is, partner.
Q: You must have done some things to make her feel as she does.
A: The only thing I did wrong to her, I feel, was the women thing. And I was just young and stupid — I mean, not stupid, but I did what I wanted to do. That's the only thing I'm not proud of, because I know it had to be awful embarrassing for her and hurting to her, because she was acting like it didn't bother her, because she wanted to be what she thought I wanted in a woman. So we lived partially a lie.
Q: Did you meet with Laurence Fishburne, who portrayed you in the film?
A: I met him one day when I passed the house where Tina and I used to live. I didn't have no idea they was filming there. I passed by and saw trucks on both sides of the streets. I said, "Damn, what's going on here?" And then I saw the guy I sold the house to, my dentist. And as we were talking, Larry walked up to the car — I didn't even know who he was — and he shook my hand. He had on some bell-bottom pants, y'know, like the '60s. And I never thought he looked like me. I thought they were gonna get somebody who looked like me, like Wesley Snipes.
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