In ‘select’ theatres: Irene in Time

In Irene in Time, Tanna Frederick (here at the premiere) often had me thinking of Baby Jane Hudson’s “I’m Writing a Letter to Daddy”.

For nearly forty years Henry Jaglom has worked with miniscule budgets to make films based on his interpretation of women’s issues, or films about women with issues. Mostly set among the nouveau riche of Los Angeles and Manhattan, he’s cast them with friends, acquaintances and actors of all stripes with varying results. He has a formula which extends scripted drama into improvisational group therapy sessions. You could call him amateurish, naïve, enigmatic, irritating, brilliant, annoying and a genius all at once and get no argument from me.

    Henry is hung up on women and his present muse is Tanna Frederick. She follows Victoria Foyt, a one-time Mrs. Jaglom who gave excellent performances in Babyfever, Déjà Vu and Going Shopping. Tanna made her debut for Jaglom three years ago in Hollywood Dreams, and he probably committed more time and energy promoting her in that picture than perhaps anything he’d ever done before.

    They’re back with Irene in Time (2009), about a woman with unresolved father issues, her failure in the dating game, and the comfort she takes in conversing with women and singing in a female band. Yes, it’s pure Jaglom, but Tanna is pure torture.

    Apparently incapable of delivering ‘less’ to the camera, she plays at a level bordering on psychosis. The inverted concentration clouding her eyes, the overbearing mood swings, the overdone, giddy grimace: is the director exploiting the mentally ill? He certainly seems fixated on her ungainly schnoz: the poor woman is mercilessly photographed in profile.

    Irene leads a one-woman crusade to ‘find’ her deceased father. He died when she was five- or six-years-old. (Lucky stiff!) Who was he? What was he? Questions that should’ve been addressed ages ago are hashed out to the point of tedium. Has this bovine wench been harboring destructive (incestuous?) obsessions for thirty-five years or more? (Tanna’s bio says she was born in 1979, but this ‘ingénue’ could be pushing forty.) By the time she pulls a Norman Maine at the finale, it feels as if a huge weight has been lifted.

On DVD: Quid Pro Quo

Is it my imagination, or was the term ‘quid pro quo’ virtually nonexistent in movie dialog prior to Silence of the Lambs? Ever since Jodie and Sir Anthony’s tit-for-tat, QPQ has maneuvered its way into the vernacular, though I doubt I’d trust anyone who’d ham-fist it into everyday conversation. First-time writer-director Carlos Brooks uses it often in — what else? — Quid Pro Quo (2008), wherein beautiful twenty-somethings employ the thousand-yard-stare while uttering it as a challenge. They’re part of an alleged subculture of paraplegic wannabes lining the streets of lower Manhattan in their wheelchairs, and on more than one occasion the whole thing had me thinking of David Cronenberg’s Crash. I love that movie, because it’s about pain, sex, degradation and mutilation, the cornerstones of my pickled brain. Quid Pro Quo, on the other hand, is about delusion and metaphor and the colorless victims of self-inflicted, guilt-ridden whimsy. It’s also one of the few times I felt embarrassed for actors (Vera Farmiga in particular — although she often looks wonderful) who seem to be straining to believe all this nonsense.

We’re gonna par-tay like it’s 1969

Above: Judging by what’s written on the chalkboard, Professor Benson refuses to go down gracefully regarding Les Biches.

You remember Raymond Benson? He’s the guy who gave us last year’s list of the Top Ten Films of 1968 for the Encyclopedia Britannica Movie Blog. You know: the guy who completely blew off your humble narrator’s cherished Les Biches. (I’m still smarting from that one, RayRay.) Well, fire up the bong and slip on your tea-shades: this Friday (August 7) he’ll begin posting his Top Ten Films of 1969, a two-week series sure to thrill, entertain, puzzle and madden us all. As he did last year, Mr. Benson is offering a prize to the first person to correctly predict what his #1 selection will be. Will The Wild Bunch take it? Easy Rider, perhaps? The Sicilian Clan? Army of Shadows? Hello Dolly? The mind positively boggles. At the invitation of the Britannica Brain Trust, I’ll be ranting from the peanut gallery comment section along with a wild bunch of other bloggers, fans and cineastes. You be there, too! It all starts here.

Benson's 69 x 10:

#10: Where Eagles Dare

#9: Alice's Restaurant

#8: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

#7: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

#6: On Her Majesty's Secret Service

What Other Planet Features This?

Steve in 2000 with one of his creations (the hand lettering is his); click to enlarge.

Steve Fiorilla
January 12, 1961—July 29, 2009

The last time I heard from Steve Fiorilla was over a year ago. One of his usual packages was crammed into my mailbox, bulging and packed to the gills with stuff: magazine and newspaper clippings, movie reviews, weird crime reports, articles about drifters and subversives, movie stills, schedules for Eastman House, movie poster postcards, copies of one or two of his latest illustrations, and the manuscript.

    He never regarded himself a writer, but he loved scribbling down thoughts in longhand on a legal pad. Although it was often a series of capsule movie reviews, the manuscript could branch off into any direction. He’d go on about family gatherings, observations on mainstream obsessions, rants over the state of fandom, or, if a film was boring, a detailed critique of the theatre he saw it in.

    But by that point, I’d had enough. Not with the content of the manuscript, nor with his writing. It was the job of typing that got to me. Steve adamantly refused to get a computer, and turned a deaf ear when I suggested he use the one at the public library. The manuscript in that package was very, very long; after an hour, I’d typed just three pages with another twenty left to go.

    I hastily put it in an envelope with a note, asking if he’d go to the library, open a Yahoo email account on one of their computers, type his work himself, cut and paste it into an email and send it to me. At which point, I explained, I could cut and paste it into a text document, do some minor editing and simply put the thing online. He never replied and we never exchanged letters again.

    Over the years there were similar (but less final) gaps in our correspondence, a van Gogh/Gauguin association, Steve undoubtedly Kirk Douglas to my Anthony Quinn. We first made contact in the late 1970s, but never met in person, and I spoke with him only once on the phone. Throughout the years we’d establish a bond and trust, getting to know one another in letters that ran on into the night.

Magick Theatre #7

    Our love of movies as well as for the monster magazines that littered the newsstands during the 60s brought us together. Steve was an amazing artist and humorist, and began sending samples of his work as I was publishing Magick Theatre, a movie fanzine. The influence of Steve’s humor began to show in issue #7, starting with his enigmatic cover blurb, “Only three out of ten can hack it.” I had no idea what it meant, but it was just funny. That issue rolled off the press twenty-four years ago, and the line still cracks me up.

    My inability to juggle marriage, work, home and hobby caused Magick Theatre to end with issue #8. There were plans for #9, for which Steve had envisioned a special section or newsprint insert called Inside Fandom, made to resemble the National Inquirer. He conducted a riotous interview with a verbose movie fanatic he discovered in the Boston area, and we accumulated several articles about obsessive fans and bizarre illustrations that were as comical as anything you’d find in National Lampoon.

    A lot of the material was typeset and pasted up, but the issue unfortunately died in mid-production. (A few of Steve’s pages were later used in Rick Partridge’s fanzine, Fantasy Pie.) Our last print collaboration was a one-shot comic zine titled Eegah. Published in 1987, the unique cover border was a photograph of a clay sculpture Steve made specially for the mag. He was always experimenting and combining mediums; I can’t think of another artist whose work looks at all similar.

Above left: Steve’s cover for the unpublished Inside Fandom. Right: The first page of a letter he wrote in 1995 (after I’d sent him a copy of Theodore Roszak’s novel, Flicker) on our snazzy Magick Theatre letterhead. On some occasions he’d end a letter with “This has been a Filmways presentation, dahling.” Click images to enlarge.

    Illustrator, painter, sculptor, animator, graphic designer… Steve ignored boundaries. His influences were varied. In animation, he seemed to have a soft spot for Ralph Bakshi, Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass. Puppets, too: he went on a Sid and Marty Krofft jag not long ago. Very well read, he loved pulp and noir authors, as well as Kerouac and the Beats. (We once worked on an unfinished article titled ‘What Other Planet Features This?’, based on a line in Kerouac’s Dr. Sax.) In keeping with the mood, Steve loved bebop and cool jazz. He had a limited tolerance for rock, though he took a shine to Eric Burdon’s “Spill the Wine” (bongos, bass and flute) and flipped when I turned him on to Leonard Cohen. (He ID’d with manic depressives.)

    He resisted technology and the internet. Sometime in the mid-90s he was trying to find a certain recording on audio cassette, but to no avail. “Steve, they don’t make audio cassettes no more,” I said. He was hesitant to buy a CD player, wary about the new format, or of giving in to modernization. (I wonder if he ever read The Magnificent Ambersons?) That Christmas I bought him a beat box through Amazon. When the package arrived at his door, the very thought of receiving something labeled ‘Amazon’ frightened him. “Thank you,” he wrote, “but now I feel tainted.” He was soon listening to probably more music than ever before. I sent mixes and albums burned on the pc. The Cannonball Adderley album Quintet Plus elicited a succinct rave: “Eek-A-Wow-Wow!!!”

    Not as responsive to home video, he preferred to see films theatrically. He visited Eastman House regularly, ferreted out university screenings and obscure film clubs, and saw most new mainstream pictures. He’d write me about the films as well as the adventure in seeing them: the drive, the theatre, the patrons. When people began walking around talking into cell phones, he thought he’d landed on another planet. To him, it was just another gadget, a form of slavery. I envied his free spirit.

    I’m writing this several hundred miles from where he lived. He had another life I was never privy to, as a volunteer, counselor to the sick and art teacher to cancer patients. He suffered for years from Fabry’s disease, and wrote to me on occasion about problems he had with his kidneys. He helped the homeless at Friends of Night People, and designed the logo art of eyes in the dark. He was selfless and giving, and found art and humor in a world at odds with his health and sensibility.

Above: Magick Theatre bumpersticker designed by Steve

The Buffalo News obituary

Steve @ Flickhead:

The Fourth Wall

Boy on a String (book review)

The Dead Travel Fast (book review)

Living Between Panels and Frames (comic review)

Thursday Afternoon Matinee (Steve writing as Jacques Corédor)

The Jacques Corédor Archive (Steve writing as Jacques Corédor)

Steve’s art online:

Fee Fie Foe… Fiorilla

The Art of Fiorilla

Denizens of the Dark

Steve at MySpace

Also:

Steve at Wikipedia

Steve remembered at Potrzebie

Notice at The Comics Reporter