Movie Herald: Smalley’s Theater, Hensonville
I found this theater herald, for Smalley's in Hensonville, in an antique store in Windham, New York. Note the six digit phone number. It's an 8.5 x 11 inches sheet that when opened shows the Cry Wolf ad.
Documentary Review:
Birth of the Living Dead (2013)
Zombos Says: Very Good
It's something you would be hard pressed to write in fiction: small Pittsburgh-based production company gets bored with making television spots that include Mr. Rogers' Gets a Tonsillectomy, beer commercials, and a Calgon commercial knocking off Fantastic Voyage and decides to produce THE MOVIE that would change the face of horror.
Of course George A. Romero, John Russo, and Russ Streiner never realized the THE MOVIE part at the time; and we can forgive them for first wanting to do Romero's screenplay Whine of the Fawn, a Bergmanesque snoozer. But thank god for us reality reared up and kicked sense into them that a horror movie was an easier sell to their prospective investors. The rest is history. And a rich and inspiring history it is.
Bob Kuhns captures this inspiring history to a worthwhile degree in his lively documentary Birth of the Living Dead, giving us the skinny on how a small production company moved from small fries ad spots to buying a 35mm camera in hopes of baking a hot potato money-making movie. So what if it didn't make much money for Romero or his investors? It sure as hell made tons of money for everyone else, and the nightmare it started is still going gangbusters across the zombie-stomping globe, from commercials (ironic, right, given Romero's start?), to television series, to an endless stream of mall crawls, village invasions, movies, and merchandising.
That movie, Night of the Living Dead, originally written as a comedy, created the tropes, themes, styles, and scares that are constantly revisisted and expanded on today. But you already know that. Its cheapo black and white starkness, its non-actors who could actually act and ad-lib their lines, and Romero's simple screenplay delivered through sharp editing, still chills us with its flesh-eating zombies (or as Romero originally called them, "Ghouls") and their unending aim to eat anything not moving fast enough away from them. Toss in that eerie, nerve-tingling, music score and the all-hell-breaks-loose-everybody-for-themselves dynamic with its marked deviation from the usual supernatural, psycho, and scientific horrors playing theaters and drive-ins up to 1968, and it's no wonder the wise-ass matinee kids–waiting to goof around and chuck their popcorn at the screen the minute the credits rolled–didn't know what hit them between the eyes. Neither did the critics whose ire was boundless. Romero and company set out to make Night of the Living Dead "as balsy a horror film as we could make." Their gorilla filmmaking did just that.
Night of the Living Dead premiered on October 1, 1968 at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh. Nationally, it was shown as a Saturday afternoon matinée – as was typical for horror films at the time – and attracted an audience consisting of pre-teens and adolescents. The MPAA film rating system was not in place until November 1968, so even young children were not prohibited from purchasing tickets. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to the film with such potent content for a horror film they were entirely unprepared for. "I don't think the younger kids really knew what hit them," he said. "They were used to going to movies, sure, and they'd seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else." According to Ebert, the film affected the audience immediately. (Wikipedia)
Although Kuhn invokes enough authoritative talking heads to establish this fact (among them are Gale Ann Hurd, Larry Fessenden, Jason Zinoman, Elvis Mitchell, and Chiz Schultz), it's Romero's ingenuous reminiscenses and witty insight we salivate over. The way he explains it, it sounded like the whole undertaking was a lark. A lot of hard, crazy work, but a lark.
Splicing in Vietnam War footage, scene clips, animated segments, 1968 race riots footage, and a side trip as teacher Christopher Cruz shows Night of the Living Dead to his young students in his Literacy Through Film Program class (yes, the times have indeed changed), we always come back to Romero as he describes the shooting's trials and tribulations at the abandoned farmhouse they rented, and the final nerve-racking search for a distributor. Everyone involved wore muliple hats to pitch in: Bill "Chilly Billy" Cardile joined the cast as a news reporter and gave free publicity for the movie through his Chiller Theatre horror hosted show; aerial shots of zombies stumbling in the fields were provided courtesy of hitching a ride with the local news chopper; local sheriffs with their police dogs joined in the zombie hunting with gusto; Chuck Craig, a real newsroom reporter played a fictional newsroom reporter, writing his own news copy for the movie, making it play uncomfortably too real.
With the movie in the can and ready to sell, distributors presented more challenges because they wanted a happier ending. No way was Night of the Living Dead in any way a movie that could end happily. Walter Reade eventually took the chance, with depressing ending and all gore scenes intact, but screwed up big time when they inadvertantly dropped the copyright notice off the new prints when changing the original title of Night of the Fleash Eaters to Night of the Living Dead. How many millions of dollars did Romero and his investors never see because of this simple oversight? As Night went public domain, their profits went out the door. Sure, Romero can laugh it off now, but it must still hurt. A lot.
The usual social and political instigations and social backdrops for how and why Night of the Living Dead eventually hits every nerve just right is touched on but glossed over by Kuhn and never fleshed out. He doesn't plumb those connections, just their intimations. Sure, maybe it was luck and timing; maybe Romero was too lazy to change the role of Ben, written for a white actor but played by a black one instead; or maybe, subconsciously, Romero and company weren't really taking shortcuts but tapping into some Jungian primalcy without realizing it, fueled by their annoyance at how much the 1960s promised to change the world's social order, but failed to.
So damned if they didn't just go ahead and change the world on their own instead.
SilverHawks Sky-Shadow
An Adventure to Color
Part 1
I was a big fan of the SilverHawks animated television series when it first aired in 1986. I also had collected all of the toys, but sold them a few years ago. The mix of bionics, bird wings, and metal seemed a little like combining DC’s Metal Men with Hawkman and then centering it all in space. I like space adventures. This 1987 Happy House coloring book is pretty cool. I’m fighting the urge to color the pages.
Part 2
DVD Review: The Exorcist
40th Anniversary Blu-ray
Zombos Says: Excellent mix of movie versions and features in one set.
Not having watched the extended director's cut or original theatrical version blu-ray editions previously released, this 40th anniversary set from Warners Home Video, adding two new special features on a third disc and a snippet from William Friedkin's book The Friedkin Connection, is a superb way to re-experience the artistry of The Exorcist, one of the top 5 horror movies made.
One of the new additions is Beyond Comprehension: William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. Blatty, former comedy writer (good luck with that career after this movie hit), now famous horror author and screenwriter, takes us on a tour of old haunts. Our first stop is the guest house he eventually settled into, with mass quantities of coffee and cigarettes, to write his novel. He explains the few false starts that led him there; for instance, his first choice of writing milieu was a beachfront abode, but noisy cresting waves were too distracting for him. Throughout, Blatty keeps a wowser! how lucky was I attitude that pops up a little too often to remain fresh, especially at times when more revealing exposition on the process of how he got that lucky would have been appreciated (and yes, that's the writer side of me pointing fingers here, of course). One startling revelation: he didn't have an outlined plot and worried he would eventually write himself into a corner. I recall Charles Dicken's never outlined his novels, either. (Lucky bastards, the both of them.)
The impetus for the novel and its memorable terrors was a true-life case of exorcism that ocurred in 1949, which both Friedkin (in his in-depth commentary for the movie and his book) and Blatty refer back to, often. The second new addition is a 20 or so minute chat with Father Eugene Gallagher, who talks about Blatty's time at Georgetown University and that 1949 case, and the exorcism rite itself. This is an informal, filmed in black and white, interview conducted at the time the movie was first scaring audiences, so the set up is minimal, the hair of the interviewer long (radio talk show host Mike Siegel), making it more suited to diehard religious or Exorcist fans with less itchy trigger fingers on their remotes.
The effectively teasing snippet from Friedkin's book, where he relates his experiences with the movie and Blatty, is contained in a hard cover booklet that fits neatly into the cardboard slipcase along with the DVD jacket. It's a revealing nugget of information that compelled me to get Friedkin's book. It also makes you wonder where horror's gotten off to, after such a promising decade in which it received stellar attention from topnotch directors and actors and writers.
Those of you who have watched the previous blu-ray versions will already know how crisp and vibrant the viewing is, and how rewarding Friedkin's scene by scene commentary can be–I didn't realize until he pointed it out how he used the subtlety of having Father Karras rising (ascending) in his scenes–and how much the documentaries Raising Hell: Filming the Exorcist and The Fear of God: The Making of the Exorcist make you appreciate the nuts and bolts that, finally assembled into the movie, deliver a jolt of character-driven dramatic tension and release you don't often see in today's horror movies.
I can't really say which version I prefer, original or extended cut. The original 1973 showing is the one that made The Exorcist a classic. It's also the one I remember getting the willies from, sitting in a theater in with a whole bunch of other people getting the willies, too. On one hand the original is concisely executed, but on the other the additional 12 minutes have their moments. Some of them include the overly done subliminal flashes of the demon's face, but others reinforce the dual horrors of the medical examinations and the demon's possession , like Regan's jarring crab walk down the stairs. Thank god the technology back then wasn't ready for it: had I seen that in 1973 I don't think I'd have slept a wink for weeks afterwards.