Obscure One-Sheet: Headin' for Broadway

They're singers and dancers.  Lovers and dreamers.  They're young, talented and scared.

I remember finding this poster many years ago when fishing around a bargain bin in a movie memorabilia shop in Millburn, NJ.  It looks like an after-effect of the Fame craze and, sure enough, it was released in 1980.  That's probably not enough time for this to have been produced after the release of Fame meaning that this film was likely in production at the same time.  In any event, it clearly lost out on the "down-and-out-singer-songwriter-actor-hoofer" movie sweepstakes.  It's never appeared on home video and most of its stars were barely heard from again.  

However, it is of interest for several reasons.  One of its stars, Paul Carafotes (who, going by IMDb, was only 16 or 17 when this was filmed) would play a solid supporting role in the 1983 Tom Cruise film, All the Right Moves.  Another star, Vivian Reed, is a Tony-nominated actress and sings one of my favorite '70s Philly Soul tunes, "Save Your Love For Me," which appears on the great WEA compilation, Creme de la Creme: Philly Soul Classics and Rarities.  

Lastly, it was co-written by one Larry Gross, who strangely does not mention it in his diaries even as he contains amusing stories about 48 Hrs. producer Joel Silver's 1980 musical bomb, Xanadu.  Headin' for Broadway director Joseph Brooks, who struck gold of a certain kind with 1977's You Light Up My Life, only had a few more directorial opportunities after this one.

Obscure One-Sheet: Cover Me Babe

Life.  Love.  Illusion.  At 24 Frames Per Second.

With those immortal words, Cover Me Babe (or cover me babe, if we follow the poster's lead) was unleashed on the public.  Still unavailable on home video, Cover Me Babe was director Noel Black's unsuccessful follow-up to his masterful debut Pretty Poison, an achievement he was never able to match. Vincent Canby was especially scathing in his review, saying, "Although Cover Me Babe is a second feature, it looks very much like a first and had it been a novel, it probably would have stayed in somebody's trunk.  Because of the huge investments involved, even mistakes like this can't be allowed the honor of decent obscurity."  

This was also one of the projects that star Robert Forster immediately signed up for after his well-received work in Haskell Wexler's towering Medium Cool.  Where Black's precipitous decline led to the likes of Private School (a suitably raunchy T & A flick, but still...), Forster would recover to make exploitation hits such as Alligator and, much later, Tarantino's Jackie Brown. 

Cover Me Babe has shown up on the Encore networks in fairly recent times, but I've always managed to catch it in the middle.  Forster plays a disagreeably pretentious student filmmaker who dreams of artistic success outside of the studio system. The supporting cast includes a pre-Clint Sondra Locke, Ken Kercheval (who had appeared briefly in Pretty Poison), Mike Kellin (so good in Midnight Express), and a young Sam Waterston.  

I love how the one-sheet design very tastefully covers the model's breasts with camera lenses, literally covering her while offering a play on the film terminology of "covering" or "getting coverage."  In case the watermark on the bottom isn't clear, the scan comes from Moviegoods. 

Check out the opening credits: