Five Movies: Five Books About Movies Worth Your Time

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned that literature about film was a useful way of feeding the Cinephilic meme, so it only seemed fair that the Cap'n give you some suggestions. More often than not, the casual-to-curious film fan will wander into their local bookseller (or retail chain), head for the "Media" section, and find themselves inundated with oversized "making of" books, unauthorized celebrity bios, and more "1001 ____ Movies You Must See Before You Die" than you can shake a stick at. The end result tends to be that they leave with nothing, feeling perplexed about where all these "great books" their friends talk about are.

One of the problems - perhaps the largest problem - is that the critical analysis or scholarly approach to film texts are limited to small, university presses, and most major chains don't feel the need to carry them. It is, after all, not their target demographic - typically the casual shopper looking for a paperback to enjoy on a sunny afternoon - so you won't find analytical texts just anywhere (periodically they pop up in used book stores, especially ones in the vicinity of a college campus).

Then again, the neophyte or leaning cinephile will want to wait for most of those texts, so while I'll mention a few after the list proper, this edition of Five Movies will focus on good "entry points" with a dash of heavier reading to keep you busy. Whenever possible, I'll link the titles to Amazon, so you have a reasonably priced starting point.

1. VideoHound's Cult Flicks & Trash Pics (edited by Carol Schwartz with Jim Olenski) - Let's start with a video guide; when I was younger, I used The Video Movie Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, but as the list of films grows, the reviews become shorter and shorter, and omissions ramped up. VideoHound publishes guides by topic, genre, and year, so you get more concentrated subsections of films, with better information about the film and its relative merits. I chose Cult Flicks & Trash Pics because if you want a handy guide to the "underground" films that exist in the realm of meme-dom, this is a great point of entry. It also makes a good companion to J. Hoberman and Johnathan Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies.

2. Hooked by Pauline Kael - From movie guides, let's move on to collections of reviews by critics; while I do own a few books by Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael was far and away my favorite "newspaper critic" - her reviews are insightful, witty, and so effortlessly well written that it drives me crazy I can't come anywhere close. Kael died ten years ago, and her collections are woefully out of print (I found Hooked at a used book store), but our number 2 pick is a little bit easier to find than 5001 Nights at the Movies, which is also excellent. Hooked deals with reviews from 1984-1989, covering a number of titles you may be familiar with (and many you won't be), and even when I don't agree with Kael (like her pans of After Hours and Raising Arizona), I appreciate the level of writing she brings even to pithy dismissals. This book would make a fine counterpoint to Harlan Ellison's Watching, which covers much of the same time period in cinema.

3. The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans - You may have seen the documentary based on our third choice, also narrated by Evans, but it doesn't even scratch the surface of this entertaining, frank, and frequently revelatory autobiography from the former head of Paramount Pictures. Evans makes it clear from the get-go that this is his version of the story, but his path from salesman to B-movie actor to mogul is never dull, even if the facts tend to lean only in one direction. As "tell all"'s or Hollywood biographies go, skip what you normally see on the shelf and gravitate towards The Kid Stays in the Picture; you'll learn a lot more and have more fun doing it.


4. The Director's Series by various authors, editors, et al - This series, which sometimes goes by the name Directors on Directors, is a collection of interviews with various filmmakers about their process, history, craft, and themes in their body of work. There's one for just about any director you could be interested in: David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg, Douglas Sirk, Lars von Trier, John Cassavetes, Louis Malle, Ken Loach, Woody Allen, Kryzysztof Kielslowski, Pedro Almodoovar, Tim Burton, Paul Schrader, Barry Levinson, John Sayles, Robert Altman, and Terry Gilliam. Personal favorites? I'd start with Lynch on Lynch or Gilliam on Gilliam, which have a more conversational tone with the directors in question. Burton on Burton is a treasure trove of information, but its structure is more of introductory text preceding a quote from Tim Burton moving chronologically through his films. It's interesting, but less intimate, so I'd start with Gilliam or Lynch and more forward from there.


5. The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film by J.W. Rinzler - As chronicles of making a film go, you'd be hard pressed to find a more in-depth exploration than The Making of Star Wars. I assure you that even the most die-hard Star Wars fan is going to find plenty of revelations in the book, about the writing process, the conceptualizing of Lucas' vision, the perils of making the film, its disastrous first edit, and the effort that went into making the first film a cultural landmark. Rinzler does similar work with the Indiana Jones series and The Empire Strikes back (and, one must assume, eventually Return of the Jedi), with plenty of access to everyone involved in the making of A New Hope, and the book feels like it steps beyond the typical "Lucas whitewash" that other "histories" of the films have.

This is just to get you started, of course; if you want some really good "theory" I suggest More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts by James Naremore, Horror, The Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Theories of Authorship, edited by John Caughie, or Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction by Scott Bukatman. If you like more niche or subgenre guides, hunt down Stuart Galbraith IV's Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films.

If you want to have some fun with reviews or career pieces, check out Vern's Five on the Outside, Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal, or "Yipee Ki-Yay, Moviegoer!": Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema, and Other Important Topics. You can also look at the series of director interviews with the likes of Steven Soderbergh, David Lynch and The Coen Brothers. Want to know how to make a movie? Try Robert Rodriguez's Rebel Without a Crew or Lloyd Kaufman's Make Your Own Damn Movie!. Want a cultural history of a genre? Check out David J. Skal's The Monster Show, Kendal Phillips' Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, or Joe Bob Briggs' one-two punch of Profoundly Disturbing and Profoundly Erotic.

I'm always looking for more good reads, so if you have one, pass it on.

Cinephilia: Meme Without a Cause

Before the internet made (no pun intended) virtually everything accessible, I used to wonder how it was that knowledge of the obscure, the forgotten, or the "cult" films came from. The information seemed to travel like a meme; no one could pinpoint exactly where they heard it from, or declare with any certainty that this knowledge originated from any source more reliable than a "friend of a friend told me." It just appeared - one day you didn't know about these movies, and the next you did.

Voracious readers experience a similar phenomenon, one that provides a gateway into the experience I'm talking about: at a certain point in time, almost invariably high school, some students clue in to "alternative" literature, seemingly without a point of reference. The only point of entry that makes sense is the one student that always seems to carry around The Portable Beat Reader, but how one makes the leap from Jack Kerouac to Aldous Huxley or Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, or Hunter S. Thompson, I can't say. If my library had a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I didn't know it. I don't even remember how I knew the book existed: I just did. Ironically, years before I had been reading issues of Rolling Stone that Thompson wrote essays for (the one that springs to mind is "Polo is My Life," which became the book he never released between Better Than Sex and Kingdom of Fear), but I didn't read those articles. In retrospect, I wish I had, but the literary "virus" infects without warning.

The same is applicable to film, even if there are a few more tangible sources to point towards. Most film "geeks" spend (spent? considering current trends) hours poring through the titles at video stores, attracted to lurid cover art or titles that confound the mind. The video store clerk, not always the stereotypical "comic book guy" from The Simpsons, was handy in offering suggestions. True story: while applying for a job at a local video store (a job I did not end up getting because I was too young), the manager interviewing me suggested that I watch Swimming with Sharks because I really enjoyed Kevin Spacey in The Ref. Had she not suggested I rent Swimming with Sharks, I may have missed out on the film entirely for years.

Looking back on the job I did get, a seasonal shift working for Suncoast Video (now FYE), the root cause for the cinephile "meme" still remains elusive: aside from a friend asking me to find Sid and Nancy*, much of my time working there wasn't spent combing through titles I didn't recognize or hadn't heard of. To be fair, it was the holiday season and I was only sixteen, but both prime opportunities to identify an originating "there" for the cinematic virus both come up blank.

The truth is that I don't know who told me that The Evil Dead was a film to see. Maybe it was The Video Movie Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter - that was, I recall, the first time I ever heard that Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn was practically a "remake of the first film" - then again, maybe it was a review of Army of Darkness in the local newspaper. I didn't see Army of Darkness at the time, but I knew it existed, and with a bit of diligent investigation, it's possible I traced the sequel back to Sam Raimi's debut. The problem is that you always seem to be telling other people about these films, but can never suss out how you knew about them. Nobody told me about The Rocky Horror Picture Show; it just always seemed to be there, a midnight listing for The Rialto every week. One week, we decided to go, not really knowing much more about the film or the rules than when we didn't want to go.

Once the meme reaches you, infects you, the information and the desire to learn more increases exponentially. One film leads to another, that leads to another, that leads to a dead end, a rumor, a film no one can find: the Cannibal Holocaust's, the "director's cut" of Dawn of the Dead, a "workprint" cut of Alien 3, the "five hour" Dune. At the time, with limited resources, these seem like impossibilities. They have to be "out there" because you read some arcane reference to the fact, or saw a discrepancy in the running time** somewhere.

Now, things are a little different: the internet leveled out much of the conjecture, many of the second or third-hand sources, and the growing availability of DVDs have, in many ways, altered the landscape permanently. Access is different, although surprisingly as vague as the meme was before an era of instant availability. While it's much, much easier to find out about apocryphal "geek" trivia, like what's missing in different versions of a film (see Movie-Censorship dot com), the paper trail is nevertheless no more definite. The availability of information is more prevalent; it's source remains nearly as ethereal.

Apropos to this discussion is the fact that I don't consider the internet to have "ruined" geek culture: Patton Oswalt made several salient (if tongue in cheek) points in a Wired article titled "Wake Up, Geek Culture: Time to Die" and maybe the "cult" aspect of fandom is vanishing thanks to over-saturation. We live in an age when the random, the lost-in-the-shuffle, the marginal can not only be found on the Internet Movie Database, but the poster is only a Google Image Search away (often linked to a page where it's for sale), has at least one link on Amazon***, and if an industrious pirate has enough perseverance, the film itself is floating somewhere in the digital cloud.

The digital cloud, so to speak, has become another fold in which the film meme hides itself. What's different is that the limited resources of fifteen or twenty years ago have, for the most part, disappeared. People visit this blog as a result of image searches for films like Monsturd, a movie I can't imagine is really that widely discussed. Still, someone heard the title from a friend of a friend (or from Netflix), and plugged the title in. They ended up here, and I take great pride in being a source that passes on the film meme, or Cinephilia as I like to classify it. Maybe I can tell you where I heard about these films from, but I'll be more than happy to pass them on if they're worth your while.



* True story - Sid and Nancy was, at that point, not available on VHS. I jokingly suggested she buy a sixty dollar Laserdisc copy of the film. The laserdisc's publisher? Criterion.
** This continues to be a point of curiosity among friends: when Artisan released The Ninth Gate, the Spanish running time was fifteen minutes longer than the American version, which I have never found any accounting for, or if a longer cut even exists.
*** Take, for example, Five Minutes to Live, also known as The Door-to-Door Maniac: a Johnny Cash and Ronnie Howard vehicle from the 1960s that most Cash fans don't even know exists. Seven Amazon listings for the DVD as of five minutes ago.