- Got that?
- Everybody with me?
- All right, let’s go.
- You’ll recall that I hated you yesterday.
- Not you.
- It wasn’t personal.
- Just a general, all-consuming loathing of the entire species.
- So I cranked up the teevee and watched me some movies: The Long Goodbye, Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.
- The first two are available on Amazon Prime and objectively fine pictures (in very different ways), while the last one I had to torrent and is objectively garbage (but in a tremendously entertaining way).
- Let’s get the great flick out of the way: Go watch The Long Goodbye right now.
- RIGHT NOW.
- Why are you still here reading this garbage?
- You could be hanging out with Elliot Gould, solving mysteries and chain-smoking.
- Elliot Gould smokes so much in The Long Goodbye that the credits have lung cancer.
- The most unbelievable thing about the movie is that he never coughs.
- Lights his unfiltered Camels off the previous one’s dying butt, and yet never chokes up a lung, even when he chases a car halfway through Hollywood.
- The second most unbelievable thing about The Long Goodbye is how his character can get from the Hollywood Bowl to Malibu in ten minutes.
- I know there was less traffic in 1973, but those locations are 35 miles away from each other.
- Plus, Elliot Gould was driving a ’48 Lincoln.
- He probably had to pull over and top off the oil three or four times.
- That’s a cinema sin!
- DING!
- (Christ, I hate that fucking guy. He’s got, like, four jokes that he just rewords every time. That’s my bit.)
- Anyway, The Long Goodbye is Inherent Vice, but with Sterling Hayden in the Eric Roberts part and Henry Gibson in the Martin Short role, and a much bleaker ending.
- You know you’re watching a 70’s movie when the ending’s bleak and Henry Gibson’s in it.
- Love me some Gib.
- Look at this creepy little motherfucker:
- Love me some Gib, man.
- Sure, until a few years ago I thought he and Buck Henry were the same person, but still: love me some Gib.
- There are also women in the film.
- In order of appearance, they:
- Do topless yoga.
- Purposefully drive their husband to drink/suicide.
- Get a Coke bottle smashed across their face.
- Robert Altman and the New Feminism, ladies and gentlemen.
- Go watch it; it’s funny and sad and gorgeous and Jim Bouton tries to act.
- Let’s move on.
- You wanna get nuts?
- C’mon, let’s get nuts.
- The Island of Doctor Moreau was an 1896 novel by H.G. Wells about a dude who makes pig-people.
- On an island, obviously.
- Y’kinda have to.
- If you live in town, the authorities are gonna close down your little abomination factory tout suite.
- City governments need to keep the roads paved, the streetlights lit, and the yak-men numbering zero.
- Even one yak-man is too many.
- So if you wanna make some, you gotta get away from the general populace.
- Maybe you could go up a mountain, but why not go somewhere warm with a beach?
- The yak-men will thank you.
- Wait.
- No.
- The yak-men would like the mountain.
- But all the other chimerae would thank you.
- Hollywood has adapted IODM three times so far (there’s a new version in production).
- First was in 1932 as Island of Lost Souls starring Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi, who looked like this:
- Bobby?
- Anyway, there was one in 1977 starring Bert Lancaster and Michael York that no one remembers, and then the 1996 version that should also be forgotten save for the fact that IT’S COMPLETELY INSANE.
- I am not talking about the legendarily clusterfucky production, the topic of which is the subject for Lost Soul: Richard Stanley’s Blah Blah Blah, and we’ll discuss shortly.
- Just the movie.
- Even if you don’t know anything about it going in, you’d still be in full what-the-fuck mode within 20 minutes.
- For example, this film stars David Thewlis.
- What the fuck?
- Who would let David Thewlis star?
- Especially if he’s gonna make this face?
- And he makes that face a lot.
- Pretty much every scene.
- Maybe because there was no script, and so he had to write his own part.
- And, man, does he make the wrong choices.
- He plays the guy who washes up onto Dr. Moreau’s island.
- This is supposed to be the viewer stand-in.
- We discover the horrors of the isle along with him.
- Except I guess David Thewlis found that role boring and decided to have his character INSTANTLY grok everything that was going on.
- And not be all that bothered by it.
- Not one scene where he’s just standing there confused.
- “Wha? Huh? Is that a pig-lady? What kind of fucking island is this?”
- No.
- Immediately figures it all, processes it emotionally, and begins flirting with a catwoman.
- Fairuza Balk plays a catwoman.
- You can’t make this kind of movie without a catwoman.
- Now, was Fairuza Balk a kitty that Marlon Brando turned into a human, or vice versa?
- We are not told this, because the movie itself did not know the answer.
- The film had no script.
- Sometimes, that works.
- Spinal Tap had no script, just an outline.
- But it’s not fair to compare the two: Spinal Tap was based around improvisatory dialogue, and a few low-tech sight gags, whereas Island of Dr. Moreau includes this shot:
- And if you’re gonna include that shot in your movie, you need to have a script.
- That gif needs at least a screenplay’s worth of explanation.
- It brings up a lot of questions.
- Where do you get a midget-sized piano on a secret evil island?
- Did the yak-man build it?
- And who tunes it?
- It’s a jungle island, for fuck’s sake.
- It’s humid.
- Both of those pianos are gonna sound like 1971 Garcia in weeks.
- The movie also does not explain why Marlon Brando has a misshapen miniature clone of himself, but I’m more concerned with the temperedness of the instruments.
- I ask the tough questions, man.
- Val Kilmer’s also in the flick.
- That’s during the beast-people drug orgy scene.
- Thought you were gonna get out of this without a beast-people drug orgy scene?
- What are you, new to this?
- Richard Stanley was new to this.
- Great segue.
- I’m proud of it!
- Lunkhead.
- Yeah.
- Anyway, IODM was Richard Stanley’s project.
- He acquired the rights to the IP, wrote the script, commissioned elaborate art and character studies, packaged it all up, pitched it with his posh British accent, sold it to New Line Cinema, signed Brando to guarantee a green light, got Val Kilmer (who had been Jim Morrison and Doc Holliday and Batman recently) to assure financing, then hacked a set into the middle of an Australian jungle.
- And then immediately lost control of the production.
- Four days!
- It only took him four days to get fired!
- And those four days were so fucked that Rob Morrow, the original possessor of David Thewlis’ part, cold-called the CEO of New Line Cinema to beg to be released from his contract.
- You know what an actor will do for a part?
- You know what an actor will do for a check?
- Those are four fucked days, man.
- Richard Stanley had made two previous pictures, but they were both low-budget B-movies and this was a $66 million production.
- (That’s in today’s money, and you know I always convert to today’s money for you, Enthusiasts. I love you like that, plus I’m always curious and it’s not that much hassle to write it down. It’s hatefully rude for a writer not to convert old prices to their current values. Don’t tell me something cost ten bucks in 1931. I have no idea what that means without context.)
- So instead of helming a lean crew of his friends and two or three actors at most, he was now essentially the head of a multi-national corporation.
- Major motion pictures employ so many people that they have to organize themselves into departments, each with their own internal hierarchies, for purposes of command.
- Plus a dozen feature actors and twice that many extras.
- Think of being in charge of that many people.
- And now think of Val Kilmer yelling at you in front of all those people.
- He used to do that a lot.
- Not so much any more.
- For various reasons.
- Richard Stanley has spent the entire pre-production getting high in his rented house and communicating with the crew via drawings, and now Batman is berating him in front of Fairuza Balk and Rob Morrow.
- I have nightmares like that.
- Remember Burden of Dreams, the documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo?
- Remember how when Werner Herzog spoke, you became entombed in his insistent madness, and lost in his erudition, and began to understand why people join cults and/or help Germans drag boats over mountains?
- Richard Stanley does not produce that effect.
- You want to use the Time Sheath to go back and convince him to choose a different profession.
- Novelist.
- Graphic artist.
- Something where you sit quietly in a room by yourself.
- I’m not putting that down, mind you.
- My favorite activity is sitting quietly by myself.
- I do it all the fucking time.
- Which is why I do not direct major motion pictures.
- So New Line fired Richard Stanley–who, instead of going home, set up camp in the jungle outside the set–and hired veteran John Frankenheimer, who tried turning shit into shit salad until…
- BUM BUM BUM
- …Brando arrived.
- This was 1995.
- The Godfather was a very long time ago.
- On The Waterfront took place in a different age.
- This was Late Period Brando, and he didn’t give a shit.
- You wanna see some graduate-level not-giving-a-shit?
- Look at this:
- That’s the earpiece Brando had his assistant read him his lines through.
- It’s not that he had trouble remembering his lines, it’s that he flat-out refused to read the script.
- Although in Late Period Brando’s defense, both Middle and Early Period Brandos had also pulled that kind of shit.
- Look:
- Don’t use Robert Duvall as your cheat sheet, man.
- He doesn’t deserve that.
- So Brando shows up and instantly begins a feud with Val Kilmer–who has continued the feud he was having with the original director with new one PLUS pissed off the entire crew–and making ludicrous demands such as having a dolphin head.
- “I wanna have a dolphin head and be a dolphin. I’ll be my own friend Flicka,” he would say in the voice that by 1995 sounded distinctly like someone doing a sarcastic Marlon Brando accent.
- And John Frankenheimer would say,
- “Wha?”
- “Dolphin head.”
- And then Brando would retreat to his trailer and refuse to come out until he had a dolphin head.
- Which is just not how you run a business, man.
- So, to sum up: Go watch The Long Goodbye and Lost Soul: The Doomed Richard Stanley, both available on Amazon Prime, and make your own mind about whether you want to torrent Island of Dr. Moreau.
- Thank you for your time.
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