Bikers and Angels


Bikers and Angels


[Grey Zone 1 presents a recent interview with Smithee by Preston Guiz]
x. trapnel:
Well you know what they say -- poor artists copy. great artists steal. In this regard at least, Smithee is indeed a great artist.
Jeff Whittington:
My first Smithee was BIKER! BIKER! (1967). Loved the scene where Peter Fonda and Iron Butterfly deconstruct Bakersfield.
Grey Zone 1:
Yes--incredible how the film could be influenced by Antonioni, Corman and Goddard while still maintaining at its narrative core, that enigmatic mise eb sene that is indisdutably Smithee. BTW--Look fast, and you can see a six-year-old Holly Hunter being leered at by glue-sniffing Peter Boyle (who would, after this, go on to play in JOE). Smithee could always sniff out the stars.
Jeff Whittington:
An uncredited Tom Laughlin did a rewrite on the screenplay. He later said that he learned everything he knew about narrative structure in conversations with Smithee. If it wasn't for Smithee, there would never have been BILLY JACK.

Smithee's Lonely Stance Against Scientology


x. trapnel:
Just fired up the vcr to watch something called RAGING ANGELS, directed by The Master: apart from starring someone with the unlikely moniker of "Monet Mazur" and the kid who was in the Indiana Jones TV show, it also features such classic Smitheean stalwarts as Diane Ladd, Shelley Winters, Michael Pare, and Arielle Dombasle (who having made her debut in an Eric Rohmer film seems determined to sink lower and lower with each flick.)
At the moment we are intercutting between a truly horrendous heavy metal band performing a song whose lyrics prominantly feature the words "Sleep With the Devil" and some dweeb on a motorcycle.
oh, wait, the dweeb is the guy who started the band and whose bandmates are now giving the heave-ho.
Further developments will be posted as the film progresses and my gin consumption accellerates ....
Al Dekker:
Good pick, trap. The song "Sleep With the Devil", of course, is a reference to Smithee's identically titled Victor Buono vehicle---one of the director's favorites, I understand. [SLEEP WITH THE DEVIL]
x. trapnel:
Line from RAGING ANGELS: "In this world you must be as gentle as a dove but as wise as a serpent" said by Shelley Winters as the religious fanatic grandmother to the above mentioned dweeb.

There are truly wheels within wheels -- although this film has shed some light on Smithee's oeuvre, it still raises more questions than it answers. For instance, his shunning by the Hollywood mainstream, which here finds its allegorical voice in Smithee's daring denunciation of Scientology (suffice it to say that Smithee will not be directing any of Tom Cruise's upcoming vehicles). Pare plays a thinly-disguised L Ron Hubbard who is not only trying to bring about a one-world socialist dictatorship, but is in fact in league with the devil (conjuring the evil one up to kill a right-wing senator prone to ranting about the "New World Order" at one point). At one point Pare/Hubbard says "Don't you think it would be better for a few troublemakers to die than for the whole world to suffer?" A truly chilling indictment.

I had heard rumours of Smithee's involvement and subsequent falling out with that branch of the O.T.O. centred around the jet propulsion lab in Pasadena (where he may have met Hubbard personally). I had just not expected it to find such striking allegorical voice. Perhaps some of my colleagues could further enlighten me.....

Oh, and Al, thanks for reminding me about SLEEP WITH THE DEVIL. Had you not done so, the reference would have just passed me by.

Al Dekker:
Wow, trap; of course we know that Hubbard had brushes with some of Aleister Crowley's crowd back then. If it's determined that Smithee also had dealings with these people, the recurring treatment of things Satanic in his films could be seen to be of a more personal nature. This is well worth investigating.
x. trapnel:
Well the climactic battle between Good and Evil angels is spectacular and it is extraneous -- one assumes Smithee is herein making an allegorical point in his usual manner....
toxic shakti:
Ah, you and dekker have just clarified some of the more cryptic Smithee motifs! The recurring lenses that point to King Solomon's Seal! The levitating goats! The perennial fresh nun footage! (Query: Did Al have anything to do with Ken Russell's THE DEVILS?)
Grey Zone 1:
Much of Smithee's finest work if infused--nay, obsessed with an almost mythoc quality when dealing with the verities of Good and Evil.

I recall a FILM COMMENT piece detailing the director's early days at Oxford. It seems he was quite taken with a young man taken to wearing violet nehru jackets and Eye-of-Horus earrings whilst parading down Carnaby Street on weekends.

The young man was Luca Crowley (and the true inspiration for the Suzanne Vega song of the same name, BTW), and Smithee formed a near-homo-erotic bond with this flamboyant character.

Often, night would find the two doping up sqatters (some say his problem with Karen Black originated here), taking them to Luca's bizarre manse, and spraying them with an odious concoction made of equal parts goat blood, Pymms cup, and seltzer. Then the victims would be trussed up by their knees (it was Luca's belief that the soul was located in the knee). At this point, reports differ wildly. What is know for certain, is that one night Luca went to far, and Smithee ended up running through a particularly humid summer night, awash in weird red goop, screaming about the goddesss Kali and Oscar Wilde, until taken into protective custody by baffled bobbied.

That fall, Smithee moved to Florida, and began studying cinema at Oshogee U.

To this day, he refuses to speak of those times, though the image of the goat is a ubiquitous one in the Smithee canon, always signyfying Evil in its most loathsome incarnation.

At least from his POV.

toxic shakti:
Didn't Smithee plan a musical version of H.P. Lovecraft's THE DUNWICH HORROR? Or is this just another layer of the mythos that is Smithee?
x. trapnel:
That, I've since discovered, is the SLEEP WITH THE DEVIL to which Al alluded earlier. made in 1970, it starred, in addition to Victor Buono, Vic Morrow, Russ Tamblyn and Julie Newmar, with a score by Brian Wilson. Not widely seen, it was to have been the flagship release of Smithee's own independent production company, but, alas, the film's Bodega Bay, California location (subbing for lovecraft's upstate Massachusetts) was plagued by tragedy and misfortune: during production one stuntman died and a couple of locals playing extras disappeared amidst rumours that actual sacrifices to Yog-Sothoth were being performed on the set. Smithee was forced by the local authorities to decamp for an improvised studio in Burbank to finish the film, and the extra expense bankrupted his company. In addition, it has been widely suggested that this film was a contributing -- if not the most significant -- factor in Wilson's eventual institutionalisation (and of course we all know what happened to Morrow). Once again smithee tries to exorcise his Crowleyite past, but cannot shake the hellhound on his trail.....
toxic shakti:
This may explain the rumors that Smithee will not spend the night in a room containing 90 degree angles, i.e. corners. On location he is reputed to sleep in a yurt, while any hotel room in which Smithee deigns to sojourn must be specially replastered to remove those offensive nexii, which, in Satanic lore, serve as gateways to the nether regions
Erin a.k.a. EB:
I heard he has a Feng Shui consultant on retainer, for a cool grand a week, and had his whole bedroom--in the Pasadena house--redesigned, window moved to another location in the room, door moved, so that the chi could travel freely through the house and bypass the freeway. For harmony and luck, room was repainted in pink tones.


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Copyright 1996 by the respective authors