Movie Tie-In: Eyewitness

Discovered that the movie tie-in / novelization section is still intact at Montclair Book Center.  My find for the day:

I like that the cover features completely different artwork than what was ultimately used to promote the film.  The face appears to be based on William Hurt's features.  I suspect this artwork was one of several designs that was intended to promote the film itself, but was bypassed in favor of this now-familiar campaign:

Now that I have the book in my hand, I notice the billing on the poster advising viewers to look out for the "Avon Paperback."

VHS Gems at Rupert Pupkin Speaks!

Rupe was kind enough to offer me a spot in his "VHS Gems" series.  I tried to keep my list to a reasonable number...you can check it out here.

TV Spot on the DVD: Sitting Target (1972, Douglas Hickox)

Warner Archive has unleashed a bounty of hard-boiled '70s films this week.  The most anticipated--by me, anyway--of this bunch is Douglas Hickox' Sitting Target starring the late and much-lamented (by those who didn't have to work with him) Oliver Reed.  I previously wrote about this unjustly under-seen film here.  The film has famous fans in Tarantino and Wright, which I mentioned in the previous piece, with Tarantino naming Michael Fassbender's character in Inglourious Basterds after director Hickox.

This U.S. television spot is pretty effective, not just for the bluntness of the copy, but for the forceful delivery of said copy, which sounds to be laden with a touch of Boston English.  "Sitting Tah-get.  Rated R."

EDIT: I'm told by the Warner Archive folks, via Twitter, that this television spot will appear on the DVD in lieu of a theatrical trailer, as the latter could not be located.

"Cause we got the streets, suckas!"

Somehow I missed this additional bit of Warriors-inspired graffiti, which is on the other side of the building where I found this.  That wall has since been painted over white, which has subsequently been tagged repeatedly.  For some reason, however, Cyrus hasn't been "silenced" yet.

Scum / Bad Boys

I think anyone familiar with Alan Clarke's Scum who then watches Rick Rosenthal's Bad Boys will notice some striking similarities between the two films, in narrative, thematic, and visual terms.  To me, there are enough parallels that Rosenthal and Bad Boys screenwriter Richard Di Lello (author of The Longest Cocktail Party) probably should have given some direct acknowledgment to Clarke and writer Roy Minton's film (as well as the earlier Scum teleplay that proved to be too much for the BBC).   

Bad Boys is a pretty rough film, particularly for a mainstream American product intended largely for teen audiences.  Scum, however, makes its American cousin look like a preschool picnic and is a much stronger film for it.  Where Bad Boys injects a love story into its narrative, an inspiring, incessant Bill Conti score, a Rocky-like final fight, and a theme of redemption, Scum doesn't attempt any of these softening, conventional touches.

What the American film hints at or suggests, such as male-on-male rape, Scum pulls no punches with and rubs the viewer's nose in.  There are mostly sympathetic guards and administrators in the juvenile prison where Bad Boys star Sean Penn does time; the men who run the borstal in Scum range from cold and unfeeling to unrepentant sadists.

In Bad Boys, the prison is shown to be flawed, but the film still makes it a force which turns bad boy Penn into a better man.  The borstal in Scum is a brutal, inhumane place and the film offers no hope for those inside or for some kind of reform to the system.  A few years after Scum was released, the borstal system was abandoned in the U.K.  Whether the film influenced this in any way and how truthful the film is to the actual borstal experience, I'm not certain.

I illustrate some of the parallels and contrasts of the two films in this video essay.

EDIT: I just found out about a French-Canadian remake of Scum, entitled Dog Pound, via this most informative Scum Wiki page.

Based Upon a Novel By...

Some recent finds from my longtime favorite bookstore...

Basis for the film of the same name.  The works of William P. McGivern were often mined by Hollywood.  Films based on McGivern stories include Rogue Cop, The Big Heat, and Odds Against Tomorrow.

Basis for the film of the same name.  Evan Hunter is but one nom de plume for one Salvatore Albert Lombino also known as Ed McBain.

Basis for the film Fast-Walking (aka The Joint).

TV Spot Not on the DVD: Heavy Metal (1981, Gerald Potterton)

"This weekend, check newspapers for a midnight metal theater near you."  Percy Rodrigues, who voiced the evil Locnar in the film proper, also voices this rare television spot for Heavy Metal. 
Unfortunately, the spot is cut off at the beginning by about 5 seconds.  I sure do wish the DVD or Blu-ray of the film would have included an original theatrical trailer for the film (not the 1996 reissue trailer, which you can find on YouTube).  There are probably not too many other examples of the trailer v.o. artist also appearing in the film, also in v.o. form.

Vintage Video Logo: Paramount Home Video

This logo from the early days of home video combines a droning synth piece for the soundtrack and a volcano effect from which the Paramount stars and logo "erupt" from the iconic Paramount mountain.  This was pulled from an original Breaking Glass VHS cassette.

Cruising's Original Color

Some captures from a DVD-R I made several years ago, pre-DVD release, of a cable broadcast of Cruising.  These stills more closely reflect the original theatrical look of the film before it was re-colored / re-tinted by director William Friedkin for the film's DVD release in 2007.  I earlier posted about this here.

Please forgive the sub-DVD quality of these clips--they come from a non-HD broadcast--but they are better than VHS, at least, and in the correct aspect ratio.  If you see one of the '90s-era 35mm prints struck by Warner Bros. you'll get a very good sense of how much the film was altered for its DVD release, with the color palette being the most striking difference, in addition to some new transition and slow-mo effects (I am not fond of those alterations, either); the club scenes, in particular, are stripped of much their original color in favor of a very pervasive blue hue, which covers everything.

I do hope that if Cruising is released on Blu-ray, Friedkin follows a similar course that he did with the re-released French Connection Blu-ray, wherein he and d.p. Owen Roizman restored the look of the original theatrical prints to Blu-ray.  Roizman was none too thrilled with the first French Connection Blu-ray, supervised by Friedkin, and which had a radically different color scheme.  I wonder how Cruising d.p. James A. Contner feels about the DVD of the film, which has undergone a similar transformation and which I don't think he had any part in.  The disclaimer pictured below was removed by Friedkin in the DVD version of Cruising.

Not So Obscure TV Spot, But Still MIA on DVD: King of the Mountain (1981, Noel Nosseck)

This is one of those quintessential late-night films...by that, I mean the kind one would discover on television back in the days when the network affiliates would play movies in overnight time-slots rather than informercials and reruns of Friends, Seinfeld, or That '70s Show.  It's an odd little film that faded from public consciousness soon after its middling theatrical run, takes place mostly at night in the hills above L.A., is set in a cool milieu (illegal drag racing), and has a cast of interesting, though second-tier stars.  Since its leading man, the titular "King," Harry Hamlin found fame in the '80s on L.A. Law, even "winning" People's "Sexiest Man Alive" crown in '87, I'm sure this one found plenty of "late show" airplay in the '80s.  Later, in college, Rupe and I would watch this sort of thing via ex-rental VHS tapes, but still Noel Nosseck's King of the Mountain eluded me until now.

I caught a VHS rip of the film, which has been completely absent from DVD, possibly due to the inclusion of some popular source tracks by artists such as the Police, Styx, and Robert Palmer, and watched it late at night, thereby somewhat replicating the experience I might have had seeing it on the CBS Late Movie, ABC Late Night, WPIX 11, or WWOR 9.  In my head, I can the hear that authoritative network v.o. saying something like, "We now return to King of the Mountain starring Harry Hamlin."  Made in 1981, this is a hard PG, reminiscent of the many '70s films that packed in much rough stuff, but still maintained that kid-friendly PG rating.  There is plenty of smoking, drinking (including some slugs of Jack Daniels while behind the wheel), some sex (though no nudity), violence, and some nasty language.  In short, another film mostly made for adults, but without the requisite amount of "fucks" and nipples to earn an R.  The film was produced by mini-major Polygram and distributed by Universal; I believe Universal still retains distribution rights.  Its home video in the U.S., in the '80s, was handled by Embassy.

Taking a page from the Saturday Night Fever school of development, H.R. Christian and Leigh Chapman's script is based on a magazine article about a real emerging, local subculture.  In the case of King of the Mountain, the article was "Thunder Road" and the magazine was New West (the West Coast sister magazine to New York, where "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" was published).  The article told of the exploits of a couple of racers in the illicit car racing scene that developed along Mulholland Drive in the '60s and '70s.  Harry Hamlin's Steve seems to be an amalgamation of two young drivers profiled in the article (Chris Banning and John Hall) and is the "Tony Manero" of the film.  He's the baddest driver on the scene--"the King"--appropriately handsome and cocky, who boasts of being able to drive the 1.8 mile course "blind-folded."  Hamlin just isn't as dynamic as Travolta and his inner struggle isn't fully explored enough to make his character arc / transformation all that moving or dramatic, as I'm sure the filmmakers intended.  Dennis Hopper is the grizzled vet and former "King," who was driven mad after nearly killing himself on the course 15 years earlier.  This is Hopper several years before his career revival (Blue Velvet and Hoosiers) so the story that he took a six-pack and finished it while doing some dangerous driving for pick-up shots is not surprising.  In spite of the tolerance of the shaky Hopper's presence on the production, original lead Brad Davis was reportedly fired for his drug problem.

The filmmakers apparently felt the need to flesh out the script by adding in a secondary plot about Steve's roommates and former racing compadres (Joseph Bottoms and Richard Cox) who are now trying to break into the music scene, writing and producing songs for singer Deborah Van Valkenburgh (who sings her own songs in the film, which are produced by Jack Nitzsche!).  Seymour Cassel is a high-powered producer angling to buy Bottoms' songs and get Van Valkenburgh into his stable of talent, without the participation of Bottoms and Cox.  There is tension between the artistic and idealistic Bottoms and the more business-minded Cox (who casually tickles the ivories at one point, just as he did a year earlier in Cruising).  The music is reminiscent of a lot of the '70s California soft rock popularized by the likes of Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, and many others, and I like to imagine that the recording scenes (which I like) are a somewhat authentic re-creation of that milieu and its creative process.  The rock-based score is by the late Mike Melvoin a composer and studio musician with a very impressive list of credits going back to the '60s.  I don't know L.A. topography and geography enough to say for sure, but I assume the boys' pad is somewhere in Laurel Canyon, where much of the aforementioned music and artists were based.

So, the film becomes a sort of fusion of Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Saturday Night Fever, Rocky, Spetters, Breaking Away, The Idolmaker, Dreamer (also directed by Nosseck), and surely others that I'm not thinking of right now.  It's not entirely successful, by any means, but it's an entertaining diversion and certainly not deserving of its current no-DVD obscurity / limbo status.  However, reading the New West article, it's clear that the film would have been much better off following its streamlined approach: that is, focusing solely on the racers and their obsessions...their cars, speed, and the road...their environment, and the cops trying to take them down.

"I'll never stop for the police in my car," Chris says. "Not if they're after me with the militia. There are people out there who work for the city who want to get me, but there's no way anybody can catch me in this car. I wouldn't stop if they set up a barricade. If they caught me, they'd impound the car and mess it up. I'd kill myself if anything happened to this car. I love it more than anything."