evanevanevan

Monica sends me this censored-for-television version of the most famous line of 21st century cinema:

Though it's not even three years old, I'm already gripped with nostalgia for Snakes on a Plane. More accurately, it's not the actual film that I think fondly of so much as the anticipation that led to it. It had all the makings of one of the greatest feel-good stories of movie fandom. Seizing on the total absurdity of the plot and its perfectly straightforward title, it became a cult sensation before a trailer was even out. It was all set to be the finest example of fan influence on filmmaking to date. The (uncensored) line from the above video was not originally in the film, but when online fans demanded that Samuel L. Jackson say it, the filmmakers actually went back after the movie had already wrapped to shoot additional footage, including that line. According to legend, when the producers were about to rename the movie, Samuel L. Jackson balked, claiming the title was the only reason he had agreed to do the movie.

As you recall, after months of hype, the actual release of the movie was a total dud at the box office. So what went wrong? Well, New Line Cinema made two fatal errors. The first mistake was not moving up the release date to capitalize on the hype, instead waiting till everyone was already sick of hearing about it. The second, far graver error was in not putting my song on the soundtrack.

You see, the studio sponsored a song contest where fans were invited to write snake-related songs and submit them to be voted on online. The top ten vote-getters would be sent to the producers and director who would ultimately choose one to go on the soundtrack.

The song I wrote, "Two Snakes on a Plane," ended up getting the most votes of them all. My lyrics were quoted in an AP article that was reprinted, among other places, in the Redeye. I saw various bloggers refer to the song as the song they wanted to hear at their wedding. Oh, to be a D-list internet celeb again!

Ultimately, though, the filmmakers chose a song by Captain Ahab, a legit duo from LA, crushing my dreams of having the jam of the summer. I still have hopes that in the future, SoaP will be rediscovered and have a long life on the midnight circuit, at which point a Restored Version will be released with the proper soundtrack.

The song itself was written and recorded within a couple days. I wrote the lyrics—which alternate between disgusting and just nonsensical—about half an hour before we recorded the vocals. And then we literally only had time to record one take of the vocals before the singers had to rush off to Bloomington. I listen back now and hear so many imperfections I wish I could fix. Among other things, it's probably about 45 seconds too long. But still, it is what it is, and people seem to enjoy it enough to ask me about it about once a month, so here it is.

The musicians on the recording are credited as The Guesstimates and include Stuart Seale and Nola Richardson on vocals, Bart Pappas and Nicholas Krause on guitar, Paul Kusper on drums, and myself on bass, Rhodes, synth, and Vocoder.

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The Guesstimates - Two Snakes on a Plane [mp3]

Jim Carrey stars as Bert Headly, an associate professor of English at a small liberal arts college. Shy and reserved, he's notorious among the student body for writing very little feedback on the papers he grades. Ignoring the requests of kindly medievalist Carole (Maggie Gyllenhaal) that he edit a paper she is submitting to The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Bert instead retreats back to his small flat to enjoy a P.D. Wodehouse novel alone. He brews a cup of Constant Comment brand tea, only to discover after drinking it, he is compelled to comment... constantly.

It's timely, and opportunities for product placement are obvious.

P.S. Did you realize that Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber were all released in 1994?

WTF?: The God-damndest Things Ever Seen, my series of bizarre cinema at Doc Films, continues tonight with the crown jewel of the series: Corn's-a-Poppin'. It's an utterly mysterious backstage musical. Nobody seems to have any real information about it - we can't even confirm the year of its release, though 1951 is probably right. In fact, for all we know, its screenings at Doc have been the only theatrical exhibitions of the movie ever. All we know is that one of its screenwriters was none other than a starving Kansas City television worker named Robert Altman.

I won't attempt to describe the film anymore, as my friend Kyle Westphal wrote the definitive piece about the film on his blog - and this is not just because it is likely to be the only piece ever to be written about Corn's-a-Poppin', but because it is a truly insightful look at the kind of unaccountable cinema that a certain contingent of Doc people/alums are particularly entranced by:

The emotional heart of a picture filled with obtusely intimate moments is the penultimate number, “On Our Way to Mars.” It has the greatest build-up of all the numbers, with little Susie begging her brother to be allowed to sing with him on the air. The result is a piece of minimalist s-f: Susie and Johnny float in a cardboard rocket while crooning about finding a grilled cheese sandwich on the moon. They set up rhyme schemes and then abandon them, finishing couplets with ‘Zoom! Zoom!’ It’s a creepy number, filled with romantic and sexual overtones—already present from the first reel of Corn’s-A-Poppin’ during which we’re not quite sure whether Susie is Johnny’s sister or his midget bride. (Susie speaks with all the bluster and toughness of a boozed-out Hollywood sideshow, cooks all of Johnny’s meals in an apron, and possesses a disposition very unbecoming of a child star.) But “On Our Way to Mars” becomes unexpectedly moving when Johnny sings about ‘dreams in Cinemascope,’ a timidly self-conscious expression about the kind of ragged, desperate movie that Corn’s-A-Poppin’ must be. Its actors will never see their names on a marquee or headline a Hollywood production; the reference to unattainable aesthetic luxuries has the effect of reminding us that Corn’s-A-Poppin’ constitutes a wooly alternative to them. The enterprise is so small-time that most of the performances come across better and stronger as documentary records of deer in the proverbial limelight. Intentionally or not, local acts of guerilla cinema like Corn’s-A-Poppin’ unleash a torrent of poetic feeling and reveal a new territory in film aesthetics.

For many years at Doc, the people running the organization were obsessed with Stanley Donen's Bedazzled starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, which you may remember was remade by Harold Ramis in 2000 with Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley. Doc for some reason would screen the original Bedazzled every single year. That tradition ended some time ago, but perhaps it is time to start it up again...only with Corn's-a-Poppin' instead.

The film screens Thursday, April 9 at 9:00 p.m at Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th St, Chicago. There will be some delightful shorts beforehand as well.

[motion within motion]

Why stop there with the Tati images? LIFE Magazine has hosted on Google a wonderful series of photos of Jacques Tati wandering around New York from a November 1958 issue. The photos are a sort of reverse Play Time, with Tati, dressed in character as Monsieur Hulot, as a tourist in America, rather than guiding an American tourist in Paris. Remarkably, some of the images of the urban landscape are strikingly similar to moments in Play Time, which wasn't released until nine years later.

The complete set of photos is here.

Starting this month, La Cinémathèque française in Paris is doing a retrospective and festival devoted to my favorite director, Jacques Tati. I really wish I could be there for it, cause there's absolutely nothing better than seeing Tati in a theatre. In his case, I don't think it's just snobbery to say that his films can only truly be seen on a big screen.

But what really makes me smile is just how charming the splash animation and overall design for the Cinémathèque's Tati site is.

This site is similarly lovely - apparently they've reconstructed a set from Jour de Fête? Wonderful.

Oh, and one more. Here's the beautiful design for the recently released Criterion DVD of Tati's Trafic:

The Doc Films spring calendar begins tonight. On Sundays there'll be post-war films by Yasujiro Ozu; Mondays features Taiwanese cinema; Tuesday is devoted to the early days of documentary films; Wednesdays are Cary Grant films; Thursdays at 7:00 feature American post-hippie urban angst from 1968-1973; and finally...

Late Thursday nights, usually at 9:00 p.m., is the series I programmed: WTF?: The God-damnedest things ever seen.

Here's the essay I wrote for the newsletter explaining the rationale:

Alice in Wonderland

When Bill & Coo, a feature film with a cast made up entirely of actual birds in costumes, was released in 1948, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee was assigned to write a review. Flabbergasted by what he had seen, Agee declared the movie "by conservative estimate, the God-damnedest thing ever seen." This series presents that film, as well as nine other contenders for that title.

Although I initially assumed that the meaning of "God-damnedest" was self-evident, from the blank expressions I received when pitching this series, I soon realized it would require some further explanation. I do this under a certain amount of protest: I believe the descriptor is as impossible to explain as the films it describes. These movies are movies so utterly bizarre that one cannot believe they are real. You see, part of what makes film so unique as an artistic medium is that, for the most part, it can only be created by a team of people. Writers, directors, actors, editors, right on down to caterers and drivers are involved in any given production, not to mention the producers and financial backers. It's impossible to imagine, then, that such a large group of people could collectively agree to devote days and weeks to create a western with only dwarf actors, as in The Terror of Tiny Town, or a serious film depicting a Communist decapitating a small child for refusing to stomp a picture of Jesus Christ, as in If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? But somehow, they happened. These are unaccountable films. These are films that should not exist. Yet, fortunately for us, they do.

The immediate conclusion a viewer may draw after seeing these movies is that they are not manmade at all, but are some sort of alien artifact - a parody of cinema made by some distant race with only vague familiarity with human and filmic conventions. Even if we are to assume that they do originate on Earth, one thing must be made clear about these films: they were not selected because they are "so bad they're good." Yes, Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s Glen or Glenda? does not conform to any standard conception of how movies work. Yet what the viewer ought to walk away thinking about is not its incompetence, but its inexplicability. Wood did not intend to create a camp classic about transvestitism. He believed he was making an earnest explanation of a practice that to this day remains completely misunderstood. Yet how could he and his crew not realize how utterly strange an explanation it was?

Some of the films are quite expertly crafted, completely defying any sort of "so bad it's good" definition. David Lynch's Eraserhead is a revered classic, a surrealist masterpiece filmed over a period of five years as a student film project. Unlike in much of Lynch's later work, there is nothing one can call tongue-in-cheek here. Thirty years later, no one quite knows how its terrifying visual effects were created, lending credence to the theory that the movie was, in fact, produced extraterrestially. Likewise, This Day and Age was made by an accomplished and esteemed director - Cecil B. DeMille. Yet its shockingly uncritical look at unspeakable mob violence - by upstanding teenage boys, no less - makes it hard to believe a major studio could have possibly agreed to make it.

Often the obscurity of these films lends them a great deal of otherworldliness. Reviewing impossible to find movies like the 1930s self-flagellating religious cult thriller The Lash of the Penitentes or the disturbing all-star production of Alice in Wonderland makes us at Doc feel like we've just dug up some horrifying item that throws into chaos everything we know about how the universe functions. That isn't to say there is not a certain amount of joy that comes with our discoveries. We have long talked about starting up a boutique DVD label under the Doc Films name with the sole purpose of releasing Corn's-a-Poppin' for a larger audience. The fact that its filmmakers and performers are so seemingly anonymous and lost to time is almost as jarring as the realization that one of its crewmembers is not anonymous at all - the script was co-authored by Robert Altman. Yet why did he neglect to discuss it in his book Altman on Altman?

In short, the God-damnedest things ever seen might best be classified as outsider art. Like their musical and artistic counterparts The Shaggs and Henry Darger, these films simply cannot be explained, and do not need to be.

All films will be preceded by rare and bizarre archival shorts, curated by Stephen Parr/Oddball Films, San Francisco.

Complete descriptions of the films are available on the Doc site:

• April 2 at 9:00 • Glen or Glenda (Ed Wood, 1953)
• April 9 at 9:00 • Corn's-a-Poppin (Robert Woodburn, 1956)
• April 16 at 9:00 • Alice in Wonderland (Norman McLeod, 1933)
• April 23 at 9:00 • This Day and Age (Cecil B. DeMille, 1933)
• April 30 at 9:00 • The Lash of the Penitentes (Zelma Carroll, 1937)
• May 7 at 9:30 • Bill and Coo & Dogway Melody (Dean Reisner & Zion Myers, 1948 and Jules White, 1930)
• May 14 at 9:00 • If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (Ron Ormond, 1971)
• May 21 at 9:00 • The Terror of Tiny Town (Sam Newfield, 1938)
• May 28 at 9:30 • Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1978)
• June 4 at 9:30 • SPECIAL EVENT: Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996)

Tickets are $5, or you can buy a pass good for every film in the entire quarter for $26.

Doc Films
Max Palevsky Cinema
Ida Noyes Hall
1212 E. 59th St
Chicago, IL 60637

[via if charlie parker was a gunslinger, there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats]

The whole calendar for the upcoming spring quarter at Doc Films will be available soon, and I will shortly detail in depth my series that will be late Thursday nights. But now, it is time to announce the most exciting thing to hit Chicago movie screens this year.

Last year, as part of my Cinemasaurus! series of dinosaur movies, we concluded the whole Doc weekday calendar for the year with an out-of-control screening of Jurassic Park. I put together an orchestra to play the movie's theme song before the film started. Then, unbelievably amazing celebrity paleontologist Paul Sereno answered questions from the crowd (he never stops finding dinosaurs!). The movie was more than sold out. Over 500 excited (and inebriated) people crammed into the auditorium, edging Deep Throat for the best attended screening in Doc history. It was a hot June day and the air conditioning didn't work, which I think enhanced the experience.

Remember, this was just days before graduation. It was one of the most joyous celebrations I've ever attended. It felt like I threw the biggest and best party I'll ever throw.

So how do you follow that up? Well, I don't expect to ever replicate anything that great... but I think we'll come pretty close with this June's screening of...

Like last year, it will also have special surprise pre-show entertainment. I'm not going to tell you what it is...but I will tell you that it will be EPIC. Perhaps the MOST EXTREME MOMENT IN CHICAGO REPERTORY HISTORY.

June 4, 2009 - 9:30 p.m.
Doc Films
Ida Noyes Hall
1212 E. 59th St
Chicago, IL 60637

Another old post from freshman year at Tisch. Just one reason I left the country's most renowned film school.

KID BEHIND ME: Do you know what movie we're watching tonight?
ME: I think it's Breaking the Waves.
KID BEHIND ME: Is that a surfing movie?

- September 23, 2004

First trailer comes out March 27; movie is released October 19.

[spike jonze fan blog]