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Film Review

Let there be light

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Remember that old Twilight Zone episode in which the earth and the sun got way too close for comfort? The twist was that the feverish protagonist had actually dreamed the hellish heat wave — and our shivering planet was drifting away from the sun instead. Another deep freeze awaits the human race in Sunshine, which imagines that the sun has begun to die billions of years before its expiration date. It’s 2057, a close-enough future to keep things familiar yet far enough to allow for certain technological advancements, like the invention of a Manhattan-size bomb powerful enough to jump-start the sun, and a spaceship, Icarus II, that can deliver such a cargo to the star’s searing surface.

Guiding what they call "the payload" to its destination is a crew that’s somewhere between the scrappy Alien gang and the perfunctory 2001: A Space Odyssey explorers. Icarus II comes equipped with a supercomputer that runs everything — imagine, uh, Alien‘s Mother crossed with 2001‘s HAL 9000. Sunshine shares other similarities with sci-fi films past (thankfully, beyond some superficial elements, The Core is not among them): the psychological effects of deep-space claustrophobia and the knowledge that there is "literally nothing more important than completing our mission," as engineer Mace (Chris Evans) points out. What individual would jeopardize a quest to ensure survival of the species?

Well, that’s why they call it a conflict. We learn in the first five minutes that the ship, which sets sail less than a decade after the failed Icarus I, is Earth’s last hope. The eight personalities aboard include aloof physicist Capa (Cillian Murphy), practical biologist Corazon (Michelle Yeoh), and medical officer Searle (Whale Rider‘s Cliff Curtis), who lingers in Icarus II‘s observation room, drinking in the approaching sun. The sun’s complicated allure is a key Sunshine theme: It’s mesmerizing. It creates life. To a scientist, it’s God. But it’ll fry you alive, especially in space, where the Icarus II‘s SPF needs are met by a glinting shield covered in gold.

It’s certain that director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland are nodding to you-know-which Greek myth about what happens when people fly too close to the sun — though mental meltdowns keep pace with literal ones on Sunshine‘s journey. The pair are probably best known for 28 Days Later, which injected a host of post–<\d>Sept. 11 worries into the zombie genre. It’s tempting to look for a similar metaphor here, but as befits the film’s setting, Sunshine‘s concerns are far more metaphysical. The doomsday scenario it suggests — call it anti–<\d>global warming — stirs up fears embedded in humanity’s DNA. "We might get picked off one by one by aliens!" an Icarus II crew member jokes, but Sunshine‘s lingering effects dig deeper than any Ridley Scott rip-off. As realistic and science based as any film about rocketing to the sun can hope to be, Sunshine elegantly, eerily taps into the same anxiety as that Twilight Zone episode — that we’re all part of a particular cosmic scheme that will eventually, inevitably end.*

SUNSHINE

Opens Fri/20 in San Francisco theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Festival Guide

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The opening-night selection at the Jewish Film Festival is Israeli writer-director Dror Shaul’s worldwide prizewinner, Sweet Mud. It views 1974 kibbutz life from a 12-year-old’s perspective, but don’t expect rosy childhood nostalgia. Though it doesn’t lack humor or adventure, it takes on backstabbing and conservatism in kibbutzim.

On a lighter note, the closing-night film Making Trouble: Three Generations of Jewish Funny Women is a TV-style documentary enjoyable simply for its episodic homage to six famous funny ladies, including Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, brassy belter Sophie Tucker, and Saturday Night Live‘s Gilda Radner. Though the career of still-breathing subject Joan Rivers has skewed toward tacky celebrity-culture exploitation, she’s sharp and candid discussing an uphill climb from being the most-hated female sassmouth on the Catskills circuit.

There are several culture-clash comedies at this year’s JFF, and one sure bet is French actor Roschdy Zem’s charming directorial debut, Bad Faith. He and Cécile de France play Parisians of wholly secular Muslim and Jewish backgrounds, respectively. Their romance goes swimmingly until she becomes pregnant, sparking all kinds of familial strife. The fest’s sidebars include a miniretrospective for Berlin-based Jewish director Dani Levi, who made a splash with 2005’s farcical Go for Zucker. Levi is the winner of the fest’s Freedom of Expression award; alas, his latest, My Fuehrer: The Truly Truth about Hitler, strains mightily and uselessly to burlesque the Third Reich’s waning days.

Among the JFF’s Israeli documentaries, one delight is Shlomo Hazan’s hour-long Film Fanatic. It follows entrepreneur Yehuda Grovais’ attempts to create a commercial ultra-Orthodox cinema — even though his constituency is explicitly banned from watching theatrical films. Among US documentaries, one winner is Ilana Trachtman’s world-premiere feature Praying with Lior, a family portrait that illuminates issues of faith, disability, and self-sacrifice.

Silent voice

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When US moviemaking started out, it was an enterprise disreputable enough to attract the wrong sort of people: get-rich-quick speculators, third-tier theater folk, organized crime, and even — god forbid — Jews. The last rose to pilot most major studios as Hollywood became a gigantic industry. Yet this alleged Jewish mafia (a term still not fully retired in some circles) seldom used wealth and imagistic power to integrate fellow Jews into the cultural mainstream. Instead, they largely buried their ethnicity by living outrageously grandiose versions of the WASP American dream. The movies they made suggested a melting-pot fondue composed solely of Anglo-Saxon American cheese.

A long line of stars stretching from cowboy hero Bronco Billy onward adopted Anglicized names and hid (or at least didn’t publicize) their ethnicity, among them Lauren Bacall, Charles Bronson, Tony Curtis, Lorne Greene (birth name: Chaim Leibowiz), and Judy Holliday. (If you think this practice doesn’t continue today, dig beneath the surface.) The moguls themselves practiced private-sphere assimilation by ditching Jewish first wives for apple-pie glamazons.

Nonetheless, the number of films produced during Hollywood’s first decades meant a few Jewish movies slipped onto the screen, if only for novelty’s sake. One is a 1925 feature called His People. This rediscovered gem is the centerpiece attraction of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s 27th annual program. Its July 21 screening at the Castro Theatre will be accompanied by a commissioned score played live by New York City jazz star Paul Shapiro and his sextet.

Shapiro will be the big lure for many. I hope his klezmer bop sounds don’t overwhelm the film. It has a relatively simple, borderline-cliché plot, including a variation on the classic "I hef no son!" moment, which reached a camp zenith when rabbi Sir Laurence Olivier disowned Neil Diamond in 1980’s remake of The Jazz Singer. But prolific, forgotten director Edward Sloman handles even that purple melodrama with tact and affection.

In "the Ghetto" (as titles inform us) of NYC’s Lower East Side, the Comiskey family struggles along. Devout immigrant father David (Rudolph Schildkraut) pegs all of his hopes on studious offspring Morris (Arthur Lubin). Dad is harsher in his judgment of Sammy (George Lewis), a street scrapper (usually in the service of defending his jag-off sib) and supposed ne’er-do-well. Only Mama Rose (Rosa Rosanova) perceives Sammy’s true-blue nature, while suspecting Morris is a weasel. It’s Sammy’s scandalous moonlighting as a boxer that puts his bro through law school. After graduating, little ingrate Morris gets a prize position and courts his rich uptown boss’s WASP daughter, claiming that he’s "an orphan" when queried about his background. Fear not: his comeuppance will be mighty, though not unforgiving.

His People is a real discovery. Wonderfully openhearted and funny, the film respects both cultural tradition and progress, rejoicing in Sammy’s love for Irish girl next door Mamie Shannon (Blanche Mehaffey). Brit transplant Sloman also directed another obscure but admirable Jewish-themed silent, 1927’s Surrender, among nearly 100 Hollywood titles. (He also racked up dozens of screen credits as an actor.) This movie suggests a major talent, yet his career sputtered once the talkies arrived. By 1938 he’d abandoned movies for radio work. In 1972 he died in Woodland Hills at the age of 86.

His People is a major exception to the silent era’s ironic general avoidance of Jewish imagery beyond the occasional comic stereotype, scheming shopkeeper, or biblical flashback. Even after Al Jolson kicked off the sound era as a cantor’s son in the 1927 part-talkie version of The Jazz Singer, Jews largely remained in the closet onscreen. They were permitted to be funny, to sing, to do serious thespian heavy lifting, so long as they appeared merely ethnic, preferably passing for Italian, amorous "Latin," or best of all, solid-gold WASP. You can’t condemn yesteryear’s performers for doing what they needed to do to succeed. But this box office hit from 1925 suggests how much richer history — the history of movies, just for starters — might have been if everyone had been encouraged to be themselves from the start.*

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

July 19–<\d>Aug. 6, most shows $9

See film listings for schedule

(925) 275-9490

www.sfjff.org

Welcome (back) to the jungle

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Early in Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog’s narrative retooling of his 1997 doc Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a group of pilots aboard an aircraft carrier watches an instructional reel on jungle survival. They’re young and cocky, and since this is 1966, the Vietnam War still seems entirely impossible. Naturally, they heckle the hell out of the film — lending a certain amount of irony, as one of them, German-born but proudly American Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), is about to crash-land directly in a situation that would daunt even the toughest solider. But as Herzog is careful to show, it’s not Dengler’s fire-building skills that save his neck; it’s his unbreakable spirit. Rescue Dawn is probably the most uplifting movie ever to feature a scene with its lead character munching down a bowl of maggots and worms.

It’s also the only film in recent memory to feature a comic-book movie hero doing same, though among the recent crop, Bale (Batman Begins) is perhaps the least likely to be identified with his biggest-budget character. His gift for physical transformation serves Rescue Dawn well; the film was shot in reverse to better highlight the extreme dieting efforts of Bale and costars Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies, who play Dengler’s long-suffering fellow POWs.

When Dengler enters their world, he’s been through some serious shit (like being dragged behind a cow by his ankles), but he has more hope than all of the others combined. His plan to "scram" immediately begins to form, though his comrades find his confidence insane. "The jungle is the prison," explains Gene (Davies), a seriously unbalanced walking skeleton who fetishizes an old food wrapper and believes that release is imminent. Far more broken is Duane (Zahn), whose weary eyes brighten only when the starving men discuss the contents of their fantasy refrigerators: "a 35-pound turkey and raspberry pie with crust thick as a steak."

If Rescue Dawn is Herzog’s most accessible fiction film to date, with its big-name stars, English script, and dialogue like "The man who will frighten me hasn’t been born yet," its transcendental tone assures it’s hardly a typical war movie. (It is, however, deeply patriotic, evidenced by the fact that MGM screened it for American troops in Iraq on the Fourth of July.) The prolific director, whose earlier narrative works include Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), both starring Klaus Kinski, has lately made his mark in documentaries, with 2005’s Grizzly Man being his most mainstream film prior to Rescue Dawn. Herzog’s films are diverse, but they tend to reflect his fascination with human beings who engage in extreme behavior. In Dengler’s case — explored more matter-of-factly in Little Dieter, more existentially in Rescue Dawn — his proactive outlook was predicated on his life experiences (including a tough childhood in post–<\d>World War II Germany, where food shortages forced him to eat wallpaper) as well as a deeply rooted temerity that left no room for hesitation or doubt. He knew he would survive, and he did survive. (Dengler, who eventually settled in Marin County, died in 2001.)

Like Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn is also about nature at its most extreme, with a jungle that’s every bit as deadly as an angry bear. Even if you haven’t seen Little Dieter, Rescue Dawn‘s title pretty much lets you know that Dengler makes it out alive, climbing aboard a rescue copter and exchanging his slithery last meal in the wild for the comfort food of civilization (in this case, a Butterfinger). But Herzog never plays it safe. Even with its Hollywood sheen, Rescue Dawn conveys palpable danger. At times it’s physically exhausting to watch, with uncomfortably realistic scenes of torture and the sight of emaciated men — sure, they’re actors, but those prominent ribs are real — arguing over handfuls of rice.<\!s>*

RESCUE DAWN

Opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

rescuedawn.mgm.com

Ephemera, etc.

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Technology induces unrealistic leaps of optimism, and so it was that usually reliable New York Times film critic A.O. Scott recently imagined a future in which "you will be able to watch whatever you want whenever you want." Drawing back a hair, Scott admitted that "there are still hundreds more titles awaiting transfer to digital media." The reality is a good deal grimmer, with thousands of titles lost or languishing in various states of disrepair — and such estimates do not take into account the colossal numbers of nonfeatures, everything from promo spots to pornography.

This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival presents two programs emphasizing some of the bygone era’s lost treasures. "More Amazing Tales from the Archives" (Sun/15, 10:30 a.m., free) is an education in itself, with representatives from the UCLA Film and Television Archive and Rochester, N.Y.’s George Eastman House demonstrating preservation techniques and spoils. This year’s program features films restored from 28mm (even the formatting is archaic!) and rare ephemera (Clara Bow fragments, San Francisco newsreels, something called Mushroom Growing). Parisian collector Serge Bromberg looks to be packing a lot of heat in his artfully arranged "Retour de Flamme" program (Sun/15, 12:45 p.m., $13) of early French cinema: trick films, travelogues, skin flicks, Josephine Baker, a "strange music-hall performance from 1907, with a dancing pig," and other confectionary surprises along the way.

Notes on Nazimova

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Audiences at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival will be treated to several strong roles for leading women — Lois Wilson’s heartbreaking humble pie as Miss Lulu Bett (1921), Louise Brooks’s gender-bending hobo in 1928’s Beggars of Life — but now as then, there can be only one Nazimova. The Russian-born enchantress (who dropped her first name, Alla) stars in 1921’s Camille, a version of Alexandre Dumas fils’s novel set in swinging Paris and a perfect vehicle for her insanely overwrought performance style (it would have to be: beyond her stirring salary, the actress had final say on the film’s director and script). It seems a cruel joke that the better-known version of Camille is the 1936 rendering with Greta Garbo, since, in the reductive annals of film history, it was Garbo who displaced Nazimova as the reigning ice-queen, only-one-name-necessary androgynous European beauty. That said, those who associate the silents with musty hokum are in for a surprise when this Camille splays across the screen, a vintage blast of Hollywood Babylon tangled up in Nazimova’s nest of black curls.

A little history might be helpful here, and besides, it’s too fun not to recount. Born Mariam Edez Adelaida Leventon to a brawling family of Russian Jews, Nazimova fled for the arts and notoriety early, taking up the violin and, when that didn’t work, joining Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre. A couple of love affairs and one fruitless marriage later, the actress embarked for New York to perform Henrik Ibsen with Pavel Orlenev, a personal friend of Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gorky. From here she went to Hollywood, where she was presented with her unusual paychecks and creative control (whenever a gentleman tries to kiss her Marguerite in Camille, Nazimova sniffs, "Not until you put a jewel in my hand"), eventually producing her own films (including 1923’s notorious Salomé) and establishing residence at 8080 Sunset Blvd., a sprawling compound that came to be called the Garden of Allah and played frequent host to both icons and outrage. A typically delicious Nazimova story: the actress hired art director Natacha Rambova to design Camille‘s sets, and the two may or may not have had a love affair before Rambova married Nazimova’s costar, fishy Rudolph Valentino.

And that’s not even touching Nazimova’s lavender marriage with Charles Bryant or, weirdest of all, her being Nancy Reagan’s godmother. If Nazimova’s personal life seems spun or at least exaggerated, it was all at the service of her queenish persona — something on prime display in Camille, thanks in no small part to Rambova’s logic-defying art deco set designs. The many arches and frills that appoint bedrooms and ballrooms accentuate Nazimova’s sinewy bends, beaky sneers, and bomber swoons.

Susan Sontag begins the inquiry in her seminal "Notes on ‘Camp’ " essay with a useful criterion for considering Nazimova’s flamboyant performance: "Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization." The tragedy of this Camille has nothing to do with Dumas’ plotting but instead lies in the decline that inevitably accompanies pure camp’s straining seriousness. In Camille, Nazimova’s wilting is foreshadowed in Valentino’s naturalistic glide, the unaffected air that purportedly prompted D.W. Griffith to wonder, "Is this fellow really acting or is he so perfectly the type that he does not need to act?" Nazimova was all aura, without a trace of naturalism; regardless of the actress’s personal tumbles, this image would have been impossible to sustain with the coming of sound. In the end, it seems, she was simply too big for real life. *

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

Fri/13–Sun/15, most programs $13–$15

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.silentfilm.org

Midnight movie memories

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CHRISTIAN BRUNO In the mid-’60s the Presidio hosted Underground Cinema 12, a package of late-night movies that might incorporate a little [George] Kuchar, a little Busby Berkeley, and a lot of porn posing as art. It was a traveling package of films that was curated by Mike Getz out of LA, but the Presidio put its own SF (which usually meant gay) stamp on things.

KAREN LARSEN Gosh, I remember going to see the Cockettes at the Palace in North Beach in the ’60s. And I remember going to a theater in Chinatown that was 99 cents and showed midnight movies.

MICHAEL WIESE (from "25 Great Reasons to Stay Up Late," by Jennifer M. Wood in MovieMaker): "[In 1968 Steven Arnold and I] were able to book the Palace Theater. At the premiere [of Arnold and Wiese’s Messages, Messages], 2,000 people showed up for a 20-minute, black-and-white film with no dialogue…. That was the real genesis of midnight movies."

MIDNIGHT MOVIES, by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum (Da Capo): "Despite, or perhaps because of, the film’s antihippie gibes, the city in which [Multiple Maniacs] enjoyed its greatest success was SF. Throughout the first half of 1971, it was the weekend midnight feature at the Palace, a movie house whose main attraction was the stage show performed by the Cockettes…. Divine was invited out for an appearance that April, and [John] Waters conducted a special live show. Introduced as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’ Divine sashayed out on the Palace stage in Multiple Maniacs costume, pushing a shopping cart filled with dead mackerels. In between ‘glamour fits,’ she heaved the fish into the audience, strobe-lit by the continual detonation of flash bulbs."

PETER MOORE We [the Roxie Cinema] were approached by Ben Barenholtz with Eraserhead in 1977 and showed it for years. Early in the run we brought David Lynch out, and I remember having lunch in a Tenderloin diner that completely charmed David. We also showed Pink Flamingos, The Honeymoon Killers, and Thundercrack! (of course). And we showed Forbidden Zone, but that was a case of trying too hard for cultness.

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, APRIL 1977 "Midnite Friday: Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! Midnite Saturday: Divine in Mondo Trasho."

ANITA MONGA Curt McDowell, the talented and charming underground (as we called them in those days) filmmaker, was a student of George Kuchar at the [SF] Art Institute, then his lover and collaborator on many films, including the infamous midnight favorite Thundercrack! Curt’s films were moving, confessional, ribald, and often absurd, with brilliant sound and picture, art direction, and original music on the teeniest of threadbare budgets. He was inventive to the bone.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES "At the Strand in SF — where the performance group Double Feature would mime virtually the entire [Rocky Horror Picture Show] — pickaxes were brandished in the audience when Frank took after Eddie with one."

MARCUS HU I remember going with a bunch of high school classmates to the Strand Theatre in 1979 and seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show and being completely mesmerized by the religious experience of being in a packed theater that was singing and performing in sync with the silver screen. It must have made an indelible mark on me, as I went to work for Mike Thomas, who ran the theater, and that pretty much defined my life!

MARC HUESTIS [Huestis’s Whatever Happened to Susan Jane premiered at midnight on Feb. 13, 1982, at the Castro Theatre to a wild, sold-out house replete with the crème de la crème of San Francisco’s ’80s new wave scene. Mel Novikoff, president of the Surf Theatre chain, gave Huestis a good deal on a fourwall as the fledgling director pushed popcorn at one of his theaters. However, legend says he was heard running out of Susan Jane screaming,] "They’ll go see this garbage, but they won’t come see the Truffaut at the Clay!"

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, AUG.–<\D>SEPT. 1982 "Saturday at midnight! Basket Case!"

SUSAN GERHARD I remember screenings of Todd Haynes’s amazing Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story at the Castro right when I first moved to SF, around 1988.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES "[Otto Preminger’s] Skidoo … has slowly but surely been gaining a second life as a midnight feature — particularly in the SF Bay area, where the movie is set."

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, JULY–<\D>AUG., 1990 "Saturday midnights … Frank Henenlotter’s latest and possibly greatest grim sex and gore comedy, Frankenhooker!"

WILL "THE THRILL" VIHARO Thrillville began as a midnight series called the Midnight Lounge in April 1997 before switching to prime time — 9:15 p.m. — on Thursdays in January 1999. Around the same time the Werepad shared its vast film library with the public weekly — not at midnight, but they were definitely midnight movies.

PEACHES CHRIST The first Midnight Mass, featuring Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, took place on May 30, 1998.

JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS Midnites for Maniacs began at the Four Star on Aug. 2, 2003. The slumber party all-night triple feature — with free cereal at 4 a.m. — featured Revenge of the Cheerleaders, Pinball Summer, and Joysticks. The first Midnites for Maniacs event at the Castro took place on Jan. 27, 2006; it was a disco roller-skating triple feature: Roller Boogie, Xanadu, and Skatetown, USA. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Late Night Picture Show

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Midnight Mass, held at the Bridge Theatre, may be the sparkling, dressed-to-the-nines jewel in Landmark Theatres’ cult-movie crown. But with a newly invigorated programming focus, the Clay’s Late Night Picture Show (and its aimed-more-at-college-kids Berkeley equivalent, the Shattuck’s Midnight Special) is also holding it down for folks who’re willing to sacrifice their sleep in the name of offbeat cinema. Curated by the self-dubbed Late Night Picture Show Films Committee (among its members: Clay manager Chris Hatfield; Peaches Christ’s alter ego, Joshua Grannell; and Late Night host Sam Sharkey), the series’ spring 2007 edition featured after-hours classics like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) as well as more esoteric choices, including a two-night run of Cannibal Holocaust (1980). For the upcoming fall season, the committee hopes to book Suspiria (1977) and (fingers crossed!) both the original and the remake of The Wizard of Gore (1970; 2007).

"In its mission statement, the Late Night Picture Show is more oriented towards classic cult films and more high-brow fare," Sharkey says. "We did Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle [1995–2002] — films that we feel are important but don’t necessarily get shown at midnight screenings."

While the programming definitely reflects a sense of fun (1985’s Re-Animator, 1973’s Enter the Dragon), the Late Night Picture Show offers a different filmgoing experience than Midnight Mass’s signature antics. "Our original intentions were to screen interesting films that we find have more critical merit and could also appeal to that midnight crowd," Sharkey explains. "Additionally, instead of having a full preshow, we’ve had special guests and people that talk before the films. Like last fall, when we did Phantom of the Paradise [1974], we had Paul Williams in person, who wrote the music. We did The Monster Squad [1987], and we had all the kids from the cast appear. Barry Gifford, the author of the Wild at Heart book [Grove Press], was there when we did a weekend [of David Lynch films]. I was proud of that stuff that we were able to do with that, as far as getting important guests." (Cheryl Eddy)

www.landmarkafterdark.com

The new midnight

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"Nine p.m. is the new midnight," declares Will "the Thrill" Viharo, programmer and host of Thrillville, the East Bay’s giant cocktail shaker of B-movie bliss. Turns out Thrillville’s earliest incarnation was as the Midnight Lounge, which Viharo first oversaw in April 1997, just a few months after Oakland’s Parkway Speakeasy Theater opened. After a particularly scorching Elvis tribute event, Viharo decided his gig, eventually dubbed Thrillville, was ready for prime time. Viharo’s delightfully sleazy tastes ("A lot of old AIP stuff — Amazing Colossal Man, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein [both 1957] — mixed in with ’60s drug movies like The Trip [1967] and blaxploitation like Shaft [1971]. I really stuck to stuff that I loved") earned him a loyal following. He’s now the programmer and publicist for Speakeasy Theaters and hosts monthly Thrillvilles at the Parkway and the Cerrito Speakeasy Theater — both of which offer menus of beer and pizza — as well as the occasional road show.

Though he’s a devoted film fan ("My life’s a B movie. People like what they can relate to"), Viharo, whose events feature his wife, Monica Tiki Goddess, and any number of special guests, sees Thrillville as much more than just a screening. "I realized I needed to turn it into a showcase. That’s why I call it a cult-movie cabaret. I’m incorporating elements of the TV horror hosts of the ’70s but also the old midnight ghost shows from the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. And also burlesque. The irony there is that burlesque houses back in the ’30s and ’40s actually gave way to grindhouses. And Thrillville is a combination of both — we’re basically bringing them back together."

Coming up at Thrillville: ever-popular tributes to the King (Viva Las Vegas, 1964) and William Shatner (Incubus, 1965), a spooky "Zombie-Rama" double bill, and, hopefully, the ultrarare Bare Knuckles (1977), which stars the fez-topped MC’s father, Robert Viharo. If all goes well, Quentin Tarantino will loan his print of what the Thrill proudly calls "the ultimate sleazy ’70s grindhouse flick." (Cheryl Eddy)

For more B-goodness, visit www.thrillville.net.

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

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The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’<\!s>" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–<\d>inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’<\!s>" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’<\!s>" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–<\d>inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’<\!s>" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

Midnight Movie memories

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0

CHRISTIAN BRUNO In the mid-’60s the Presidio hosted Underground Cinema 12, a package of late-night movies that might incorporate a little [George] Kuchar, a little Busby Berkeley, and a lot of porn posing as art. It was a traveling package of films that was curated by Mike Getz out of LA, but the Presidio put its own SF (which usually meant gay) stamp on things.

KAREN LARSEN Gosh, I remember going to see the Cockettes at the Palace in North Beach in the ’60s. And I remember going to a theater in Chinatown that was 99 cents and showed midnight movies.

MICHAEL WIESE (from "25 Great Reasons to Stay Up Late," by Jennifer M. Wood in MovieMaker): "[In 1968 Steven Arnold and I] were able to book the Palace Theater. At the premiere [of Arnold and Wiese’s Messages, Messages], 2,000 people showed up for a 20-minute, black-and-white film with no dialogue…. That was the real genesis of midnight movies."

MIDNIGHT MOVIES, by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum (Da Capo): "Despite, or perhaps because of, the film’s antihippie gibes, the city in which [Multiple Maniacs] enjoyed its greatest success was SF. Throughout the first half of 1971, it was the weekend midnight feature at the Palace, a movie house whose main attraction was the stage show performed by the Cockettes…. Divine was invited out for an appearance that April, and [John] Waters conducted a special live show. Introduced as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’ Divine sashayed out on the Palace stage in Multiple Maniacs costume, pushing a shopping cart filled with dead mackerels. In between ‘glamour fits,’ she heaved the fish into the audience, strobe-lit by the continual detonation of flash bulbs."

PETER MOORE We [the Roxie Cinema] were approached by Ben Barenholtz with Eraserhead in 1977 and showed it for years. Early in the run we brought David Lynch out, and I remember having lunch in a Tenderloin diner that completely charmed David. We also showed Pink Flamingos, The Honeymoon Killers, and Thundercrack! (of course). And we showed Forbidden Zone, but that was a case of trying too hard for cultness.

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, APRIL 1977 "Midnite Friday: Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! Midnite Saturday: Divine in Mondo Trasho."

ANITA MONGA Curt McDowell, the talented and charming underground (as we called them in those days) filmmaker, was a student of George Kuchar at the [SF] Art Institute, then his lover and collaborator on many films, including the infamous midnight favorite Thundercrack! Curt’s films were moving, confessional, ribald, and often absurd, with brilliant sound and picture, art direction, and original music on the teeniest of threadbare budgets. He was inventive to the bone.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES "At the Strand in SF — where the performance group Double Feature would mime virtually the entire [Rocky Horror Picture Show] — pickaxes were brandished in the audience when Frank took after Eddie with one."

MARCUS HU I remember going with a bunch of high school classmates to the Strand Theatre in 1979 and seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show and being completely mesmerized by the religious experience of being in a packed theater that was singing and performing in sync with the silver screen. It must have made an indelible mark on me, as I went to work for Mike Thomas, who ran the theater, and that pretty much defined my life!

MARC HUESTIS [Huestis’s Whatever Happened to Susan Jane premiered at midnight on Feb. 13, 1982, at the Castro Theatre to a wild, sold-out house replete with the crème de la crème of San Francisco’s ’80s new wave scene. Mel Novikoff, president of the Surf Theatre chain, gave Huestis a good deal on a fourwall as the fledgling director pushed popcorn at one of his theaters. However, legend says he was heard running out of Susan Jane screaming,] "They’ll go see this garbage, but they won’t come see the Truffaut at the Clay!"

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, AUG.–<\D>SEPT. 1982 "Saturday at midnight! Basket Case!"

SUSAN GERHARD I remember screenings of Todd Haynes’s amazing Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story at the Castro right when I first moved to SF, around 1988.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES "[Otto Preminger’s] Skidoo … has slowly but surely been gaining a second life as a midnight feature — particularly in the SF Bay area, where the movie is set."

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, JULY–<\D>AUG., 1990 "Saturday midnights … Frank Henenlotter’s latest and possibly greatest grim sex and gore comedy, Frankenhooker!"

WILL "THE THRILL" VIHARO Thrillville began as a midnight series called the Midnight Lounge in April 1997 before switching to prime time — 9:15 p.m. — on Thursdays in January 1999. Around the same time the Werepad shared its vast film library with the public weekly — not at midnight, but they were definitely midnight movies.

PEACHES CHRIST The first Midnight Mass, featuring Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, took place on May 30, 1998.

JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS Midnites for Maniacs began at the Four Star on Aug. 2, 2003. The slumber party all-night triple feature — with free cereal at 4 a.m. — featured Revenge of the Cheerleaders, Pinball Summer, and Joysticks. The first Midnites for Maniacs event at the Castro took place on Jan. 27, 2006; it was a disco roller-skating triple feature: Roller Boogie, Xanadu, and Skatetown, USA.

Midnight Specialists: Midnites For Maniacs

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0

› cheryl@sfbg.com

Ask Jesse Hawthorne Ficks what his favorite movie is, and he won’t hesitate: it’s Ski School. Ficks, who programs and hosts the Castro Theatre’s monthly Midnites for Maniacs triple feature, interprets "favorite" literally: the 1991 raunch-com might not surface on any highbrow top-10 lists, but it’s likely no scholar loves Citizen Kane (1941) as much as Ficks loves Ski School.

"I’ve always been upset with people who talk about guilty pleasures," Ficks explained when I paid him a visit at the Ninth Street Film Center. As the Frameline31 box office manager, he was overseeing ticket sales from a room decorated with posters from past Maniacs selections The Legend of Billie Jean (1985) and Joysticks (1983). "There is no such thing as a guilty pleasure. If you love something, you should genuinely love it. You can have some of that campiness — ‘Oh my god, Nicolas Cage’s acting in The Wicker Man [2006] is so bad, it’s hilarious’ — but you’re not cooler than the films that you’re watching. You’re actually in love with the movies that you’re watching. And you can maybe laugh at the movie, but ultimately there should be no mean-spiritedness in it."

Anyone who’s checked out a Midnites for Maniacs event knows the depths of Ficks’s cinemania. But even if you’ve never seen the gleeful host in action (typically he’ll toss out trivia questions and reward winners with prizes like out-of-print soundtracks, sometimes in cassette form), you need only peruse a list of Midnites past to get a sense of his passion — the "Aerobicize Triple Feature" (Staying Alive [1983], Flashdance [1983], and Heavenly Bodies [1984]); a 3-D night that included the third Jaws and Friday the 13th films as well as the Molly Ringwald sci-fi nugget Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983); tributes to latchkey kids, punk girls, Dolly Parton, and the underage Jodie Foster; and May’s "Vertically Challenged Monsters" night, which I can safely say will be the only time in recorded history that Gremlins (1984), Howard the Duck (1986), and Troll 2 (presented in rare 35mm prints) share a bill at the Castro. Or anyplace.

Troll 2, a horror comedy that was barely released in 1990, is a prime example of Ficks’s programming technique. He doesn’t pluck flicks from obscurity to amuse snarky audiences; he’s hoping to entertain on a more meaningful level. "I was really concerned that people were going to come out purely to destroy the film as opposed to embracing it for all of its faults," he said. "No one can define that style of acting in Troll 2. It’s not even bad acting. It’s a different style. But I think it had more to do with people being embarrassed of loving something and being so guilty. Their film professors don’t let them love Top Gun [1986]. Midnites for Maniacs is not just [about watching] films that we forgot, but also embracing them and loving them and rooting for them. Not beating up on them."

Ficks’s personal tastes expand beyond underdog obscurities. When he’s not overseeing box offices on the local festival circuit, he teaches film history at the Academy of Art College ("We have a nice exploitation chapter that’s not in the [text]book"). He grew up obsessed with Freddy Krueger in Salt Lake City, where he started coprogramming a midnight series at 16. He also exploited the serendipity of geography to soak up as much Park City as he could. "I grew up at [the] Sundance [Film Festival]. I went to Slacker [1991], and that totally changed my life," he said. "I worked at Sundance from 1994 through 2002. Every year, wherever I was, I’d go back to Sundance and work in different areas of the festival."

A self-taught cinephile, Ficks dropped a film history course at Portland State University after a professor misidentified The Untouchables (1987) as a Martin Scorsese film. After graduation he moved to San Francisco and began working at the 4 Star Movie Theatre, where he learned to be a projectionist and launched Midnites for Maniacs in 2002. At first the series chiefly drew from owner Frank Lee’s impressive stash of martial arts films — until a certain masterwork known as The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987) came along.

"I had been looking for 35mm prints at the time, and I ran into this Garbage Pail Kids print," Ficks remembered. "Frank let me play it, but he had no clue what it was. This very first screening of Garbage Pail Kids, we had 250 people — and the theater only holds 198. It blew his mind! Garbage Pail did so well that he just started giving me free rein."

Ficks’s cardinal rule for his screenings — which actually start early in the evening, with the final film unspooling at midnight — is that every film must be shown on 35mm. "You can have a billion ideas of ‘I think we should do summer camp movies.’ But the director of Sleepaway Camp [1983] cannot be found, and he has the only print. So until I can track him down, there’s no way to screen Sleepaway Camp. I know that you could screen it on video or DVD, but I think it makes it part of the challenge and the excitement that everyone’s coming out to see an antique. You’re part of the history."

Midnites for Maniacs made its Castro debut in January 2006, when a packed house cheered Ficks’s triple bill of roller-skating movies: Roller Boogie (1979), Xanadu (1980), and Skatetown, USA (1979). "It was unbelievable, and I was thinking, ‘Maybe only in San Francisco.’ "

Ficks sees the city as big enough — and full of enough diverse film fans — to support all of its various midnight gatherings. He has only praise for Midnight Mass’s Peaches Christ, though on occasion their events have fallen on the same night.

"Peaches is amazing at her performances," he said. "You can get caught up with a reenactment of the swimming pool [scene] in Showgirls [1995]. And it’s unbelievable." He views San Francisco as "a true midnight culture. There are so many films in San Francisco at midnight. I think it’s totally reinventing the culture."

And, for the record, what is it about Ski School that makes it this ultimate film fan’s ultimate favorite? Talking about the movie — which he’ll probably never get to show at Midnites, since it’s only available on video — makes Ficks reflective. "I think I’m always interested in that movie you were obsessed with as a kid. We’re the video generation. We have access to so many more films than anyone else before us. We create these weird personal theaters in our house, with these videos we can rewind and watch over and over again. So Ski School, and movies like it, I go to those movies when times are rough. They’re just like a record, or like a song. And it’s an hour-and-a-half song."

Ficks — who said he’s only walked out of one film in his life, As Good as It Gets (1997), for being "so middle of the road it didn’t matter if I watched it or not" — is determined to carry his Ski School philosophy over to his film series.

"I think when people come out to Midnites for Maniacs, it’s way more important that they have a personal relationship with the movie. It really doesn’t matter what I think about the movie — it’s most important that someone’s coming to a film, [maybe even a film] that they’ve never heard of, and they’re finding something really special." *

MIDNITES FOR MANIACS

"SUMMER CAMPy Triple Feature": Little Darlings (1980), Meatballs (1979), and Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976)

July 20, 7:30 p.m., 9:45 p.m., midnight, $10 (all three)

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.midnitesformaniacs.com

Ball of fire

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SINGULAR SIREN Sam Fuller, known for being one of the toughest mugs in Hollywood, wrote of casting Barbara Stanwyck as the matriarchal sexpot in his whacked-out 1957 western Forty Guns, "She was ready to do whatever you needed, even if it meant falling off her horse and being dragged along the ground." That Stanwyck was already 50 when she commanded this attention gives a sense of her fearsome robustness, something that held movie audiences in thrall for the better part of three decades.

A question inevitably surfaces in watching the greatest hits that dot the centennial celebration running through July at the Castro Theatre and the Pacific Film Archive: was there ever another American film actress who projected such a fully formed and coherent persona? In lesser films and masterpieces alike, Stanwyck is some kind of singularity: plot, direction, and supporting players all bend to her arching eyebrows. Her tragic Brooklyn childhood — mother dead in a freak accident when Stanwyck was four, father gone soon thereafter — may account for some of the intuition she brought to her roles, but in the end there’s no simple accounting for the bewitching blend of worldliness and sincerity that can only be called Stanwyckian.

She didn’t have the polished beauty of many of her peers, though I’ve always thought Stanwyck’s face anticipated Hollywood’s move from soft-focus cinematography (the dream visions of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich) to the angular crispness of the noir image (Stanwyck’s lead in 1944’s Double Indemnity being one of the defining femmes fatales, and terribly fun at that). More important, Stanwyck is the actress who best embodies the gift of talking pictures. The earliest film in the series, 1931’s Night Nurse, was made only four years after the first "talkie," The Jazz Singer, brought sound to screen, and already the Stanwyck heroine is cracking wise. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis essentially played as the silent stars had (with their faces, in close-up), but trying to imagine a Stanwyck performance without the sound — the hurried talk, sharp laugh, and many sighs indicating some combination of amusement, sorrow, and yearning — is a fool’s errand.

Stanwyck used the increased range offered by this new technology to decode her complicated women. The exemplar here is The Lady Eve, the 1941 Preston Sturges screwball comedy that features Stanwyck’s most virtuosic performance. It won’t come as any surprise that her character, Jean Harrington, is a whip-smart dame, but the way she balances the put-on with pathos is astonishing. Stanwyck’s trick was in playing the part — of the comedian, femme fatale, melodrama mother — with infectious relish while letting the audience in on the act and revealing its vulnerabilities. Despite the role’s many faces, we never lose sight of the center: a woman who knows the rules of the game all too well. As for women, Stanwyck’s character here reflects, "the best ones aren’t as good as you probably think they are, and the bad ones aren’t as bad. Not nearly as bad." There’s a lifetime of regret and resolve in that pause. It’s nothing that academic theories of subjectivity or identification can touch — we simply want to be with her as much as we can. (Max Goldberg)

THESPIAN EXTRAORDINARE In A Superficial Estimation (Hanuman), a small book that’s also one of the greatest ever on the subject of film, the poet John Wieners writes about his godmother, Barbara Stanwyck. Other chapters detail Wieners’s bond with his sister, Elizabeth Taylor, and with friends and relatives such as Dorothy Lamour and Lana Turner; as part of such an awesome imagined family tree, Stanwyck’s godmother role is apt. It’s hard to think of another actress both independent (remote from repressive traditional maternal bonds) and strong enough to oversee one and all.

Within the more traditional realms of canonical film criticism, Stanwyck has inspired a broad range of responses. When reviewing Silkwood for the New Yorker in 1984, Pauline Kael wrote that if Stanwyck stole and ate a sandwich, "we’d register that her appetite made her break the rules," whereas with Meryl Streep, "we just observe how accomplished she is." Kael’s zeal for Stanwyck’s vigor extended to vehicles ranging from 1935’s Annie Oakley to 1937’s Stella Dallas, a rare instance in which she endorsed melodrama, a genre she loathed. "Remarkable modernism," "miraculously natural," and "hard realism" were three of the patented double-descriptive terms the slang-loving Kael applied to an "amazing vernacular actress" whose "unsentimental strength," in her eyes, found a match in director William Wellman and worked to effectively counter Frank Capra’s cornier tendencies.

Interestingly, the feisty Kael’s male predecessors and peers weren’t always so enamored of the powerful Stanwyck. In a review of 1941’s Meet John Doe, the critic Otis Ferguson asserted that "Barbara Stanwyck has always needed managing," an observation that has more than a tinge of prefeminist chauvinism to it, even if he’s suggesting that he’d like her more if she turned her performances down a notch. The great James Agee was warmer in his appreciation of Stanwyck’s talent, though he once wrote a dual review of two 1944 films that weirdly favored the supposed "Vassar girl on a picket line" charms of flinty Joan Fontaine in some trifle called Frenchman’s Creek to Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity. Time has proved that it’s Stanwyck’s performance, not Fontaine’s, that causes a "freezing rage of excitations."

However great, Stanwyck’s wigged, campy, anklet-baring performance in that film isn’t far from — just a bit better-honed than — the type of work Joan Bennett did with Fritz Lang (nor is it as wildly inventive as what Gloria Grahame came up with when paired with Lang or Nicholas Ray). But Stanwyck was much more than a femme fatale; she was a no-nonsense personality — except when nonsense was fun, of course. She was peerlessly versatile. Not only did she repeatedly work with auteurs as widely varied as Capra, Night Nurse‘s Wellman, Double Indemnity’s Wilder, and melodrama master Douglas Sirk, she frequently put her imprint on their style. Her movies with Sirk are a great example of this — no moping Jane Wyman or narcissistic Turner, Stanwyck brings across the full force of the title of 1953’s All I Desire, even if it’s one of the director’s second-tier, black-and-white efforts.

In that movie and even more in 1952’s underrated and ahead-of-its-time Clash by Night, an adultery tale in which Stanwyck and the equally superb Robert Ryan strain against the shackles of ’50s conservatism, in the process revealing some emotional spaces rarely seen at the time, Stanwyck proves that she doesn’t need an auteur, or an auteur in peak form, to make a movie great (and I mean "make a movie great," not "make a great movie"). I don’t know if any actress has made my heart hurt the way Stanwyck does in Stella Dallas when she overhears an unflattering conversation on a train (that same vehicle where, in 1933’s Baby Face, she dealt with a different type of indignity on the way to climbing skyscrapers). We remember Stella Dallas’s monstrous polka-dot attire and Phyllis Dietrichson’s anklet, but many of Stanwyck’s transitional pictures are rewarding rather than campy. It makes the worst kind of sense that the Academy Awards were shamefully slow in recognizing Stanwyck’s talent. When it came to legends like her and Alfred Hitchcock, it could be counted on to be blind until almost the very end. (Johnny Ray Huston)

BALL OF FIRE: BARBARA STANWYCK CENTENNIAL

July 6–31, $4–$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Also July 17–18, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

Night on Earth

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Gus van Sant’s films are as thick as the Oregon sky. Swept with dreamy remove and elliptical narration, his work strikes me as being the cinematic equivalent of shoegaze music (sorry, Sofia). Now that the writer-director seems to have given up middlebrow commercial filmmaking (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) to return to the art house (Elephant, Last Days), it feels like the right time for a revival of his shoestring 16mm debut, Mala Noche. Originally released in 1985, the understated story of a scraggly Portland liquor store clerk infatuated with a Mexican street youth is based on poet Walt Curtis’s novella of the same name, with the author’s beat-tinged style re-created in actor Tim Streeter’s affecting, wise voice-over.

Novellas may be easier to adapt than poems, but it’s still important that van Sant is working from a poet’s material, as he possesses a penchant for pure lyricism that puts him in league with Terrance Malick. Mala Noche has the woozy, restless rhythm of hanging around, playing hard to get. A couple of voice-overs on white privilege aside, van Sant’s rendering doesn’t feel like it’s about anything in particular — not inconsequential, considering its chronicling of a gay, biracial love triangle (Streeter’s Walt loves Johnny but ends up sleeping with his friend Roberto). Instead of identity politics, we get longing, laughter, working-class blues, weather. There are dramatic elements here, to be sure — disappearances, lockouts, even death — but they float by, washed out in wistfulness. The narration inevitably sags in places, though John J. Campbell’s low-key black-and-white cinematography is frequently stunning, imbuing van Sant’s handheld close-ups with surprising depth (reason enough for the new print from Janus Films). With a crooked smile and a purring voice, Streeter’s character is every bit the likable asshole, and the object of his desire (Doug Cooeyate) is magnetic. It’s easy enough to see Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho coming, though one doesn’t necessarily want to leave this Mala Noche.

No scrubs

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Michael Moore is a divisive character, but he’s not the most controversial man in the United States. The first image in Sicko, the director’s first doc since 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, is of George W. Bush. But the liar in chief is only one of Moore’s targets this time around. In Sicko he goes after America’s entire health care system, examining how even folks who have health insurance are routinely screwed over by corporations that care more about profits than lives. Of course, he does it in typical Moore fashion, with big gestures, occasionally overwrought voice-overs, and a snarky humor that balance out what’s otherwise a gloomy tale.

There’s so much dejection here — babies dying because hospitals won’t treat them, Ground Zero volunteers being denied care, the exposure of corrupt insurance-company tactics, and worse — that comic relief is essential, Moore explained during a recent whirlwind visit to San Francisco. He’d just come from Sacramento, where the film was screened for enthusiastic members of the California Nurses Association.

"I’ll bet you that there are as many laughs in this film as some of my other films, but it doesn’t feel that way because there are so many sad moments," he said. "But you need that. The humor helps lead you from the despair to the justifiable anger."

Gimmicks like a Star Wars crawl to illustrate the hundreds of diseases insurance companies won’t cover lighten Sicko‘s tone, as do scenes in which Moore puts on his gee-whiz persona and travels to other countries (Canada, England, France) where emergency treatment comes quick and free and prescription drugs practically grow on trees. In France, he discovers, the government supplies nannies to do chores for new mothers — although I’m too cynical to totally accept that perk as the truth, especially since the mother interviewed is white and middle-class. Or is it my disgust with America’s shortcomings that clouds my judgment?

Disgust is what Moore is after, because it’s the kind of strong emotion that might actually motivate action. "I have to hold out some kind of hope that [change] is possible," he said. "[In Sicko, an American woman living in France] says, ‘The reason things work here is because the government is afraid of the people. In America the people are afraid of the government.’ So I’m hoping that people will stop being so afraid and apathetic and get involved."

One of Sicko‘s unlikely targets is former universal-health-care advocate Hillary Clinton — now among Washington’s top recipients of health-care-industry donations. In the film, the senator (and aspiring prez) is praised, then slammed, for her stance on the issue.

"I’ve always liked her. I had a chapter in my first book called ‘My Forbidden Love for Hillary.’ I always thought that she got a raw deal on the health thing that she tried to do. I could see instantly, as soon as she was in the White House, men were very threatened by her. There were whole Web sites devoted to her — hateful, hateful stuff," Moore said. "I have kind of a broken heart because of her votes on the war. And it was really sad, the discovery that she [later became] the second-largest recipient of health-care-industry money."

Moore, who said he’d lost 30 pounds in the past three months ("One way to fight the man!"), has high hopes for Sicko‘s long-range impact. "The whole system needs to be upended. If the American people actually listen to what I’m saying here, that we need to start rethinking everything in terms of how we treat each other and how we structure our society, a whole lot of other things are gonna get fixed, and we’re gonna be a better people. And I think the rest of the world is gonna feel a hell of a lot safer with a change of attitude."

Of course, Sicko wouldn’t be a Michael Moore movie without at least one moment that stays true to his prankster instincts. His controversial visit to Cuba has been well-documented elsewhere, so I won’t go into the details here. But I will say he was pretty delighted to ask, "Have you ever seen anyone sail into Guantánamo Bay?"*

SICKO

Opens Fri/29 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Cemetery gates

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Perhaps the only nonzombie movie in recent memory in which the dead outnumber the living, Colma: The Musical did not appear to be a hot prospect when it premiered at last year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. A musical suburban-youth angstfest made locally on a shoestring, starring and produced by no one you’ve heard of? A movie originally intended to be an indie concept album and a stage show? It is the nature of such things to be cute in theory and adorable in execution — but only if one is friends with the cast and crew. If not, it might prompt the type of frozen smile reserved for requests such as "Will you go with me to see my old college roomie play Evita?"

The high energy at the packed Kabuki Cinema for Colma‘s first big screening didn’t necessarily raise my expectations. So the cast and crew have a lot of friends, I thought. Add a decent percentage of the burg of Colma’s approximately 2,000 current residents — hey, I’d go see anything named after my hometown too — and indulgence could be counted on, no matter how lame or amateurish the movie turned out to be.

It’s normal to go a little nuts when something you expected to be so-so at best emerges as totally ingratiating instead. The worthy underdog is usually a little overrated; one current case in point is another movie musical, Once. But in the case of Colma: The Musical, over the past 15 months a number of newspaper writers and people at subsequent festivals have been as surprised and delighted as I was at that first screening. Now Richard Wong’s movie is at a theater near you — at least in San Francisco, with New York City and Los Angeles showings soon to come — and it’s possible it could become a feel-good sleeper around the nation. Like, well, Once.

Almost everywhere anyone grows up seems like Deadsville at the time, boredom being the glue that holds adolescence together. But of course in Colma, the Bay Area’s ruling burial site (breathing-to-decomposing ratio: 1 to 1,500), that notion is redundant. The protagonists of Colma: The Musical are three best friends who’ve just finished high school and have no idea what they’ll do with the rest of the week, let alone the rest of their lives. Equal parts awkward and deadpan, they love and torture one another as if going through naturally spazzy growth spurts.

Jug-eared Billy (Jake Moreno) is a wannabe actor and serial monogamist with the attention span of a gnat, so his head-over-heels crushes come as fast as reprises of the ironically titled lovesick song "Mature." His parents are weird, but at least they’re trying hard to relate to him, unlike the militarily stern widower dad of Rodel (scenarist, composer, and lyricist H.P. Mendoza), who does not react well when his son’s crackhead secret ex-boyfriend reveals Junior is a ‘mo. Much like Rodel, Maribel (L.A. Renigen) is privately crushing on Billy. Even though she’s an aspiring slut, she’s probably the most grounded of the three.

Crises happen, feelings are hurt, and production numbers are born. Two particularly resourceful, near-spectacular highlights of this $15,000 production are the drunken barroom kiss-off "Goodbye Stupid" and "Deadwalking," a wistful lament sung by Maribel and Rodel while innumerable white-gowned ladies and black-tied men waltz through one of Colma’s oldest cemeteries. The sassy humor at play is perhaps best defined by Mendoza piping the tune "One Day" to a car-alarm accompaniment. But nothing is quite so exhilarating as the opener, "Colma Stays" ("like rigor mortis"), a snarky anthem that introduces the Bay Area, the movie’s lead characters, and Colma‘s droll tenor in a sugar rush of split-screen, lip-synching joy.

Colma: The Musical was shot on mini-DV in a widescreen format, and in his first directorial feature, cinematographer-editor Wong already knows how to fill the screen and cut images to music with a genius simplicity that shames most Hollywood (even MTV) veterans. The filmic energy ideally complements performances that are deadpanned to perfect al dente density.

Irresistible at first listen, Colma: The Musical‘s songs haven’t held up quite as well as I’d hoped over the last year’s repeat listens on CD. But as someone who still treasures the ’80s college rock likes of Game Theory, Let’s Active, They Might Be Giants, and subsequent torch carriers, I’ll happily note that a musical that sounds like those groups rather than the usual bad MOR (a description applicable even to the pseudosoulful Dreamgirls and the garish top 40 pastiche Moulin Rouge) is a step in the right direction.

On the other hand, the movie has improved. Clocking in at a generous 113 minutes during its festival travels, Colma: The Musical has since been tightened to a lean 95 without losing poignancy, hilarity, or nuance. "Listen, things got outta hand, things were said, basically everybody’s at fault here," Rodel quasi-apologizes at a late point after an instance of much interpersonal ado about basically nada. The makers of Colma, by contrast, have made something remarkable from almost nothing. Their film is as sweet, funny, and dweeb-pop catchy as anything you’re going to see this year.*

COLMA: THE MUSICAL

Opens Fri/22

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.colmafilm.com“>

Suburban stasis

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Colma is not Daly City. Apparently I’m the only San Franciscan who’s failed to comprehend the pronounced distinctions between these neighboring municipalities, outside the selection of merch at their respective Target stores. Daly City has Serramonte Center and the rows of houses made famous by Malvina Reynolds’s anthem to architectural sameness, "Little Boxes" (the song that opens Showtime’s fabulous stoned-in-suburbia sitcom, Weeds). Colma’s got car lots and a few square blocks of single-family dwellings, enough for the approximately 2,000 residents who live surrounded by a whopping 17 graveyards, most catering to specific ethnicities, if not deceased pets. According to the Colma civic Web site, the price of an average home here is a grounding $280,000. Necropolis is too harsh a word — there’s something truly adorable about a town whose official motto is "It’s great to be alive in Colma."

I learned this on a drive through the town with Richard Wong, the director of the wonderfully assured Colma: The Musical, a film that uses this unlikely and oddly ordinary community as a font of artistic inspiration. For Wong, who grew up in San Francisco, the burg recalls childhood trips to Toys "R" Us after visiting family tombstones at the Chinese cemetery. He brings me to the surprisingly expansive Colma Historical Association, a museum charting the town’s lore with binders on each of the memorial parks. Then we coast through the self-contained pocket of homes and the location where Rodel, one of the three restless, fresh high school grad protagonists of the film, fictionally resided. Wong notices a bit of improvement to the place — new brick-patterned siding spruces up the garage — and a couple of houses under construction at the end of the block. Other than that, nothing’s changed, he says.

"One of the inspirations for the film came from the idea of a small town — one that doesn’t really change much — next to one of the most progressive cities in the world," Wong remarks. "Colma is almost exactly the same as it was when the houses were first built."

Colma is a character in the movie — a collaboration with Wong’s college pal H.P. Mendoza, who wrote the script and songs and capably plays Rodel — whose opening musical number, "Colma Stays," is a peppy celebration of suburban stasis. It takes Wong’s expert use of split screen to enliven the carless boulevards and the encroaching sense of teenage ennui. (Befitting its location, Colma: The Musical does wonders with its garage-sale budget and rumpus-room laptop audio- and video-editing marathons.) Billy, another of the main characters, points to a rare new feature on the landscape: a just-built police station. It’s difficult to imagine the crimes the cops must contend with.

The film, however, vividly illustrates how three Colma youths occupy themselves: crashing generic college parties, working at the mall, and hitting the bars with fake IDs. (Wong had to excise a drug-use reference — another stereotypical suburban teen activity — in order to gain permission to shoot a moody musical number in the Italian cemetery.) The fog that envelopes Colma serves as an almost too-perfect metaphor for the insularity of dead-end streets, which engender the claustrophobia of neighborhood inertia in the characters. "There’s no conflict in their lives, and that’s the problem," Wong explains. "They just don’t have that much going on." With nothing to do, people can get bitter — or they get out. The two guys manage that — Rodel, shunned by his family because he’s queer, heads to New York to pursue his dream of being in the musical theater, while Billy, an aspiring actor, packs his car to move to San Francisco. Their female cohort Maribel, the tart character who holds them together, plans to stay — though her motivations are self-deprecatingly ambiguous.

There is a genre of suburban films that usually involves teen suicide, superdepressed moms, or scary skeletons in the linen closet. If this were a Larry Clark film, the kids would be shooting up or shooting themselves. If it were a John Hughes picture, there’d be prom-related antics in the McMansion. In Colma, they sing their suburban sorrows. Wong suggests his film might be a regional music-theater production of a suburban drama, and it’s a wacky idea that’s far more satisfying than you might expect.

Mendoza, in a phone conversation, admits that he prefers films that have some empathy for tract-house dwellers. He feels that Napoleon Dynamite sneers at its characters. "I did not want that for this. I find Colma endearing," he says. "This is not an indictment — it is a locale. We’re just portraying these kids saying it’s boring." Mendoza lived in Colma during his high school years, moving there after growing up in the Mission. "At that time, all the Filipino families moved to Daly City so their kids could go to Westmoor High."

While it finds comedy in the notion of living in a generically small locale, the film exudes an affably focused sense of place. Mendoza tells me that his best friend in high school cited a particular Colma cul-de-sac as his favorite place because it had a great view of the mall. He reveals his own beloved spot, an underpass at the intersection of an up-and-coming Filipino street and a dicey neighborhood. On the sloped, stagelike hill, Mendoza and his pals would have water-balloon fights and — "This is so gay," he warns — reenact scenes from Little Shop of Horrors. Given his movie, that makes wonderful sense.

The image also fits the satisfying, hometown-boys-make-good narrative of the film’s critical success. Since Colma: The Musical scored on the festival circuit, Wong has hooked up with the more seasoned director Wayne Wang, with whom he’s currently working. Future collaborations with Mendoza are imminent, including a Colma sequel: Serramonte: The Musical. That narrative will follow, in song, Maribel’s future in retail. As a career path, that may seem like a dead end, but for Wong and Mendoza, creating a movie about it affirms that their little town of graveyards is ripe with artistic joie de vivre.

The Muppets take San Francisco

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Be warned: the following is in no way a professional, measured critique of the career and oeuvre of one Jim Henson, master puppeteer, kiddie empire creator, and upcoming Yerba Buena Center for the Arts retrospective honoree. Oh, no. Below are the semicoherent ravings of a Muppet-philiac Henson fangirl. One whose first experience of the legitimate thea-tah was not The Pirates of Penzance but "Pigs in Space." One whose initial exposure to the ways of l’amour involved a pig and a frog getting it on after extensive rounds of bike riding and loaded sexual repartee. One who breaks into Muppet palsy — spastic flailings of staccato, head-wagging ecstasy — whenever she hears The Muppet Show siren song of "It’s time to play the music / It’s time to light the lights." One who, in her aggressively weird late teens, sported a sassy shag haircut dyed a deep shade of Grover blue because, perhaps, she secretly wished she were a Muppet.

And who could blame me, uh, her? After all, Muppets can do anything, and they usually have a good time doing it. These anarchic, orgiastic amalgams of felt, foam, and fun fur are investigative reporters, musicians, demolition experts, hack comics, boomerang-fish throwers, mad scientists, misunderstood performance artists, masters of the ancient art of ka-rah-tay, and so much more. Above all, they are vaudevillians with the incessant desire to entertain — just like their ingenious creator. Part Walt Disney (minus the Nazi sympathizing), part Groucho Marx — and looking like the cloned offspring of Lyle Lovett and Jesus Christ — the late Henson was nevertheless about as unassuming as they come. He is universally remembered as the nicest guy you’ve ever met (or, in my case, wish you had). But while his Muppets may have gained superstardom on Sesame Street, it may surprise some to know that cooperation didn’t always "make it happen" in Henson’s working relationships.

"We were very competitive with each other," director and longtime Henson collaborator Frank Oz (the voice of the inimitable Miss Piggy) admitted when I used a recent promotional tour for an Oz project as a chance to quiz him, quickly, about his Muppet past. "We put each other in lousy situations and tried to screw each other over." Of course, that’s not to say Henson was the Eve Harrington (as in All About Eve) of the puppet world. He valued collaboration with his fellow artists above all else; competition was a creative catalyst. "He appreciated everybody else’s work too," Oz, who calls Henson a "genius," clarifies. "There was a camaraderie, a great affection amongst all of us."

Henson’s creative fervor and Puritan work ethic helped make the Muppets a success, but so did his business acumen, something he leavened with that patented nice-guy attitude. "He really wanted everyone to be happy in a business deal," says Muppet performer (the Great Gonzo) and Marin resident Dave Goelz, who worked with Henson from the early ’70s until Henson’s sudden death from pneumonia in 1990. "The reason Jim was such a good businessman was very simple: people loved to work with him." Goelz, who will make appearances at the YBCA on June 21 and 22 to introduce "Muppets 101," fondly remembers the sense of community Henson fostered, having never experienced the tug-of-war that characterized Henson’s relationship with Oz.

The YBCA retrospective is thrillingly comprehensive, although it could be more cohesive. The three Muppet features being screened comprise what I like to call "the real original trilogy": 1979’s The Muppet Movie, 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper (viva Charles Grodin!), and 1984’s The Muppets Take Manhattan. Also included are assorted Muppet marginalia (Mike Douglas appearances, the infamous "Sex and Violence" Muppet Show pilot, some fantastic behind-the-scenes footage), forays into less kid-friendly puppetry (a betighted David Bowie in the Terry Jones–penned Labyrinth, the gloriously strange Dark Crystal), early commercial and experimental work, and later TV work like Fraggle Rock, the corny yet inspired (the Muppet modus operandi) ’30s gangster-movie send-up Dog City, and episodes of the gothic fairy-tale theater The Storyteller.

The Muppets aren’t lowering the stage curtain anytime soon. In addition to a planned Dark Crystal sequel, a Fraggle Rock movie is in the works. Disney bought the rights to the Muppets in 2004 (something, believe it or not, Henson was trying to make happen shortly before his death, recognizing that the juggernaut could give his franchise the protection it deserves). And the Jim Henson Co. continues to produce work in part inspired by Henson, like the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s MirrorMask. Still, no one has the gall to suggest it’s like it used to be. "Sammy Davis Jr. died on the same day," Oz notes. "There’s no other Sammy Davis Jr., and there’s no other Jim Henson."

Why exactly have the Muppets managed to endure? The answer, according to Goelz, is simple. "They are us," he says. "They describe a world that’s filled with conflict, but nonetheless they’re motivated by charity. It all came out of Jim’s philosophy. He believed that people are basically good, and he operated that way."

So it turns out I am a Muppet after all. The really good news, it seems, is that we all are. Corny? Maybe. But also pretty damn inspired.*

MUPPETS, MUSIC, AND MAGIC

June 21–July 1; $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Singin’ and shillin’ with the Muppets

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I had a revelation while watching Muppets Music Moments: Statler and Waldorf are the reasons I became a film critic. As a li’l Muppet-freaked kid in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I lived for their curmudgeonly peanut-gallery zingers. But there’s plenty of stuff I didn’t remember from The Muppet Show, or that I couldn’t pick out as examples of Jim Henson’s wonderfully offbeat sense of humor — like, say, a brigade of pigs in full leather-daddy garb singing "Macho Man." And surreal numbers, like that same brigade of pigs dressed as Eskimos, belting out "The Lullaby of Broadway," or a sequence in which Kermit’s hospital-room tableau morphs into a full-on jungle scene (complete with witch doctors) as the ensemble rips into Harry Nilsson’s "Coconut." Also, there’s plenty of just plain weirdness — like, did you ever notice that the Swedish Chef is the only Muppet with actual human hands? I don’t have to say any more, except that this program is essential viewing for anyone who worshipped The Muppet Show cast albums ("Menah Menah," anyone?) — or for folks with kids who are too young to have otherwise developed outrageous Muppet nostalgia.

More for grown-ups but no less entertaining is the foray into Henson’s Commercials and Experiments. An early Kermit prototype shills for pork sausage and bacon (wherefore art thou, Miss Piggy?); another spot highlights singing gas-pump nozzles; an RC Cola ad features a bird puppet muttering, "I hate folk singers with messages!"; and a spot for Muppet toys offers a group of mini-Kermits sweetly intoning, "If you don’t buy us, we’ll bite you in the leg!" There are also snippets of Henson appearing on talk shows and demonstrating his puppetry techniques, as well as short films that are entirely puppet free — including some psychedelia, such as a delightful sound-and-image collage starring the impish Henson himself. (Cheryl Eddy)

COMMERCIALS AND EXPERIMENTS Sun/24, 7:30 p.m.

MUPPETS MUSIC MOMENTS Sat/23, 2 p.m.; June 28, 7:30 p.m.; $6-$8. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Red with blue

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Hit it or quit it: short takes on films at Frameline 31

For Christ’s sake: LGBT folk vs. Christians

Club sprockets: nightlife hits the screen at Frameline

Night of 1,000 sexploits: a Q&A with lezsploitation maven Michelle Johnson

From the ashes: Lizzie Borden’s radical Born in Flames is reborn

One-on-one-on-one: add it up for the sensual appeal of Glue

› johnny@sfbg.com

In its characteristically brisk and rich opening passages, André Téchiné’s The Witnesses (Les Témoines) will have you seeing red. Lively, fiery, appetizing, yet ominous reds bleed or burn from the credits and from background spaces within the film’s alternately urban and waterside mise-en-scènes. Téchiné’s cunning and unsettling use of the color could be a subtle nod to the Eastmancolor era of his Cahiers du Cinema forefather Jean-Luc Godard. It’s certainly a foreboding hint of what’s to come in the film. Creatively speaking, it’s also a sign of a renewed creative vigor — marks of a master.

Choosing Téchiné’s intimate Paris-set look at love under siege at the beginning of the AIDS crisis as its opening-night film, the Frameline fest, now in its 31st year, acknowledges its maturity. While LGBT identity might be thriving in the marketplace, The Witnesses does the hard work of looking back. Did gay culture almost die in the ’80s? If so, that era’s talented survivors — such as Téchiné, a Roland Barthes acolyte casually mentioned by Barthes in diary entries leading up to the years in which Witnesses is set — are guides. As his job description attests, Téchiné is a director, using a lively eye to uncover a past era’s soul and intelligence so that it might be regained. *

THE WITNESSES (Andre Téchiné, France, 2007). Thurs/14, 7 p.m., Castro ($75–$90 with opening gala)


SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL LGBT FILM FESTIVAL
The 31st San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, Frameline 31, runs June 14–24 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Parkway Theater, 1834 Park Blvd., Oakl.; Roxie Film Center, 3117 16th St., SF; and Victoria Theatre, 2961 Capp, SF. Tickets (most films $8–$10) are available at www.frameline.org

Club sprockets

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This year’s Frameline is bursting with documentaries about legendary nightlife personalities. Call it the Party Monster effect. Following the release of two films about the tragedy of Michael Alig’s breakneck rise and murderous fall, filmmakers have become more attuned to the significance of clubs in gay life — or else they’ve realized that featuring outrageous club kids in their movies is a shortcut to notoriety.

Only available via online clips, the blaxploitation homage Starrbooty features an over-the-top RuPaul as a supermodel-spy who must go undercover as a New York City street hooker to rescue her kidnapped niece from an evil arch-nemesis. Pavlovian scenester stimuli Lady Bunny, Lahoma van Zandt, and Candis Cayne are on hand to spice up the (admittedly, a tad tired) proceedings. A cameo by heavily accented porn god Michael Lucas is priceless for its awkwardness.

From the other side of the country, and the comedy spectrum, comes Alexis Arquette: She’s My Brother, which documents the transgender transformation of Los Angeles scene star (and actor!) Alexis Arquette. We follow Alexis exhaustively — as she shops, clubs, and dishes on her future vagina — until she throws a bitch fit at the end about the intrusiveness of the cinematic project (how postmodern). La-la Land drag luminaries Jackie Beat and Candy Ass (what, no Chi Chi Larue?) offer comments throughout.

The Godfather of Disco purports to tell the story of Mel Cheren, the storied gay West End Records founder who presided over such dance music innovations as the 12-inch single, the instrumental B-side, and the DJ dance mix and the release of groundbreaking disco nuggets like "Sesso Matto" and "Is It All Over My Face." Three decades’ worth of superstar DJs and club promoters enthuse over their favorite West End releases of yore, but director Gene Graham gives us only snatches of the songs and little information about the commentators. Still, those in the know will find it hard to resist glimpses of old Paradise Garage flyers and photos and quick chats with nightlife doyens like Johnny Dynell of Jackie 60, DJs Louie Vega and Nicky Sano, and producer John "Jellybean" Benitez. Plus, there’s a galloping stream of zingers delivered by the Village People’s cowboy, Randy Jones.

Dynell also pays tribute to one of NYC’s hottest clubs of the past decade in Motherfucker: A Movie, which follows six months in the lives of Motherfucker’s four touchingly self-important promoters. Director David Casey works hard to import something other than sublebrity worship into his pic, giving us some beautiful camerawork, lessons about the inner workings of club promotion and operation, and a wealth of cameos by partiers both weathered and nubile, from Sylvain Sylvain and Bob Gruen to Willie Ninja and Moby to the Juan Maclean and Peppermint Gummybear.

It’s all cool, but also a little pointless — a slew of tipsy polysexual hopefuls grinding to the latest slick club music, hardly an ounce of genuine artistic inspiration or dangerous cultural exploration in sight. (To his credit, Casey allows some of the older commentators to make this point explicitly.) "We’re all just doing our thing, waiting for the next revolution," one of the participants says. Hmm. (Marke B.)

ALEXIS ARQUETTE: SHE’S MY BROTHER (Matthew Barbato and Nikki Parrott, US, 2007). Fri/15, 7 p.m., Victoria

THE GODFATHER OF DISCO (Gene Graham, US, 2007). Sat/16, 3:30 p.m., Victoria; Tues/19, 4:30 p.m., Castro

MOTHERFUCKER: A MOVIE (David Casey, US, 2007). Tues/19, 7 p.m., Victoria

STARRBOOTY (Mike Ruiz, US, 2007). June 23, 8:30 p.m., Castro

Night of 1,000 sexploits

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Sexually repressed nuns, naughty prisoners, lustful wardens, and love-thirsty vampires are the celebrated heroines of Triple X Selects: The Best of Lezsploitation, Michelle Johnson’s effort to reappropriate 1960s and 1970s sexploitation flicks. Intrigued by these films’ soundtracks, the Los Angeles DJ, musician, and cult-film enthusiast hunted for the genre’s most precious gems and compiled them into a 47-minute metafilm. We exchanged e-mails about this unconventional history lesson, which Johnson will be presenting in person at the Victoria Theatre on June 16.

SFBG When were you introduced to sexploitation films, and what attracted you to them?

MICHELLE JOHNSON I think my first introduction to sexploitation films began when I was about 9 or 10 years old! I used to stay up late and watch cable television. My earliest memory of a sexploitation film that struck me was [1974’s] Emmanuelle, starring Sylvia Kristel. I remember it was very sexy, though I had no concept of what sexy was! I knew I shouldn’t be watching it and that it was for adults; it seemed forbidden but terribly exciting. I would also see adverts in the local paper for strange films showing downtown, which in my small Texas city meant the dirty, sleazy part of town. I so wanted to go to these films.

SFBG Why did you decide to make Triple X Selects, and how did you select your clips?

MJ I was approached by two friends who were curating Homo a Go Go [a queer music, art, film, and spoken word festival] in Olympia, Wash., last year. They knew I had a large amount of cult erotic films and many of them had crazy lesbian scenes. They asked if I would consider editing together a film montage from the genre — the crazier and the sexier, the better.

I tried to select film clips the average lesbian might have never seen. Something vastly more sexy than is in your average lesbian film. I really wanted people to laugh as well.

I heard a comment from someone who couldn’t understand how you can reclaim films that were made by men for men and present them as queer. To me, what is sexy and what is erotic is in the eye of the beholder. [These films] certainly functioned as fantasy for me way back when I first discovered Emmanuelle. As a kid growing up in a small town, I had no notion of what was queer or lesbian, but these films transported me to a really exciting fantasy world. Sure, it was a trashy, sleazy, over-the-top world populated by powerful, sexed-up women. But really, what’s wrong with that?

TRIPLE X SELECTS: THE BEST OF LEZSPLOITATION Sat/16, 6 p.m., Victoria

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