The weirdo element | Film | The Guardian

The weirdo element | Film | The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/mar/02/5/print


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The weirdo element

At first, their only audiences were freaks, geeks and hippies - but these films would change pop culture for ever. John Patterson salutes the midnight movie



* John Patterson
*
o John Patterson
o The Guardian, Friday 2 March 2007
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o Article history

Pink Flamingos

Monstrous... Pink Flamingos

I first learned the intertwined meanings of the terms "midnight movie" and "cult movie" when I was living in Washington, DC, in 1981. A nice-if-rather-square friend of mine asked if I fancied checking out a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at an arts cinema in the posh Georgetown neighbourhood.

1. Midnight Movies: From The Margins To The Mainstream
2. Release: 2005
3. Countries: Rest of the world, USA
4. Cert (UK): NC
5. Runtime: 88 mins
6. Directors: Stuart Samuels
7. More on this film

I said yes, but in truth I wasn't all that amped up at the prospect. The stage musical had been running in London for years by then, and the show's soundtrack was familiar to me, seeping into my subconsciousness along with all the English punk that had so upended my teenage mind in the previous few years. For anyone weaned on gender-teasing glam rock and in-your-face punk, all these trannies, camp sci-fi spoofs and retro rock'n'roll singalongs - this adult panto - seemed very tame by comparison.

Come the night, a good third of the audience turned up in ratty-looking homemade versions of the movie's costumes and took their places on the stage beneath the screen. Audience participation was the order of the night, and I was aware even then, even through a miasma of beer and weed, that the rituals being enacted before my eyes were also happening, at precisely the same moment, in about 200 cinemas all across America.

A wedding kicks off the movie, and suddenly the air in the cinema was filled with hundreds of handfuls of rice, which remained in my hair for days afterwards. Every time anyone on the screen addressed the character Brad, the entire auditorium screamed, in unison, "ASSHOLE!" During the songs, the motley posse of cross-dressers and Franken-tributes yowled along in delirious ecstasy, some elbowing others out of the way to nab more limelight.

There was constant interaction between audience and screen, with returning fans (some of them back for the 100th time) interpolating lines they had sat up all week figuring out. One that lingers in my mind came when Tim Curry's Frank-N-Furter turns to take his captive guests to another of his castle's chambers. A perfectly timed voice rang out from the cheap seats, "Hey, Frank-N-Furter, what's yer favourite high-protein health drink?" At which Curry turned to the camera, beckoned us with a scarlet talon and boomed, "COME!"

It was a lot of fun, even for those of us who kept our seats. A good half of the audience was composed of suburbanites who came to jeer at the weirdoes and sissy boys on stage, but by the end pretty much everyone had got into the spirit of things, screaming along to "Let's Do the Time Warp" at the tops of their lungs.

Afterwards, in the street outside, I found the oddballs and cross-dressers an eclectic and likable bunch, the first cool, switched-on and subversive people I ever met in this country. If you had one iota of weirdness in your DNA, these midnight shows of hitherto unheard-of movies, such as Pink Flamingos, Eraserhead, Night of the Living Dead, Freaks, Harold and Maude, Plan Nine From Outer Space and The Honeymoon Killers were like a second home.

That circuit, whose magnificent and sleazy heyday lasted from about 1970 until the mid-80s, was one of the many oddball places in which was incubated much of the mainstream popular culture we know now. The title of a documentary on the phenomenon tells it all: Midnight Movies: From the Margins to the Mainstream. It's based on the still-definitive 1983 survey, Midnight Movies, by two of America's best male film critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum and J Hoberman, who also appear as commentators, and it examines the crucial role of six cult classics in changing American cinema forever.

The success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the beginning of the mainstreaming - perhaps the beginning of the end - of this defiantly marginal subculture, which had diffuse roots in the communal movie-going practices of the New York avant garde and campus-based 60s counterculture, and which was doomed, along with the drive-in and grindhouse movie cultures, by the advent of the VCR and cable television. Until their demise, they offered us oddballs a place to enact quasi-primitive nocturnal rites of extreme fandom and audience participation that, all these years later, linger in my mind as the happiest movie-going experiences of my life.

The New York underground of the early 60s blazed the trail that midnight movies would later follow. Movies such as Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger's mid-period biker-centric films and Andy Warhol shorts were guaranteed to offend the censors and the NYPD vice squad, and they surely did. Meanwhile, at campus freak-outs and rock clubs across the country, psychedelic light shows were intermingled with Marx Brothers movies, Laurel and Hardy and WC Fields shorts - anything that looked incongruous when set against the swirling paisley- and buckskin-clad hippy masses. Sixties Hollywood was a joke to these people, who instead delved deeply in the vaults to rediscover and reclaim forgotten crap such as Ed Wood's movies, Reefer Madness and wonderfully psychotic oddities including Nightmare Alley and Freaks. They constituted the first outlines of a parallel alternative canon of memorable movies now thoroughly integrated into our broader understanding of film culture.

The first genuine midnight movie hit was Alejandro Jodorovsky's malevolently mystical Mexican western El Topo, which appeared out of nowhere at the Elgin Theater in Manhattan and sold out every show for nine months, mainly on the basis of heavy return traffic. John Lennon, then a local resident, loved it and persuaded his manager, Allen Klein, to acquire the distribution rights (which later doomed the movie to three decades of utter unavailability, only lately resolved). Until then, the movie had subsisted on word-of-mouth and a single weekly ad in the Village Voice, though Pauline Kael had slammed the movie in a review entitled, accurately, "El Poto". Meanwhile, other movies and directors were moving in.

John Waters spent the winter of 1971-72 making his fabulously nauseating Pink Flamingos. Waters had spent the 60s in thrall to the avant-garde New York scene, and had created a parallel movie environment for outcasts in his hometown of Baltimore, with premieres of his movies held in church halls and local dives. It was Pink Flamingos' sheer visual extremity and taboo-smashing glee - the shit-eating, the Singing Asshole, the castrations and deviant faux-sex - that pulled in the crowds once the movie moved to the Elgin in early 1973. In his wonderful autobiography, Shock Value, Waters recalled his favourite review, from Variety, under the headline: "Dregs of Human Perversity Draws Weirdo Element. Monstrous." Yeah - that was us, all right.

What connected these unlikely hits was their unimpeachable distance from the infrastructure that nourished conventional Hollywood cinema. Waters made his films with little more than pocket-change, recovered garbage and a demented sense of lapsed-Catholic iconoclasm. George Romero made Night of the Living Dead for $6,000 (it had made $12m by 1983). The last great midnight movie, David Lynch's Eraserhead, released in 1977, had been lovingly crafted over years in a lonely attic on the Philadelphia campus of the American Film Institute. Without the midnight circuit, none of these movies, all of them now American classics, would ever have been seen.

I'm so proud to have witnessed the late glory of the midnight movie. Some of my most lasting movie experiences were had in these mouldy fleapits: Night of the Living Dead and Eraserhead on a double-bill in some squalid Baltimore dump reeking of pot; Pink Flamingos at midnight on July 4 1981, again in Baltimore; and a heaped helping of sex, weirdness and ultraviolence at regular midnight shows throughout DC.

Signs of the mainstreaming to come were all about us even then, though. The very books that alerted me to this trove of strange films - Danny Peary's Cult Movies, Michael and Harry Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards, Shock Value - were a sure indication that the phenomenon was slowly dying. And it happened quickly. At some point in 1980 I saw Romero's Dawn of the Dead at a conventionally freaky midnight screening; a year later, I saw it again at the snooty and prestigious Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in DC. In that journey to a peerlessly clean and giant arthouse were concealed the plaintive dying pangs of a lovely and inspiring moviegoing tradition.

· Midnight Movies shows at the ICA, London SW1, from March 23. John Patterson writes about the "grindhouse" movie circuit in The Guide tomorrow

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