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The sudden death, disappearance, or withdrawal of a key actor during the shooting of a big Hollywood movie is the kind of Industry debacle that drives producers into a panic, capsizes multi-million dollar productions, and sends studio flunkies scrambling for damage control with press and investors alike.
Low-budget Hollywood directors working away from the glare of publicity are often able — and forced — to come up with cheap solutions to keep their productions going. Bela Lugosi died in 1956 during initial shooting of Ed Wood’s trash classic Plan Nine from Outer Space, and Wood merely grabbed a chiropractor friend to finish Lugosi’s role with his face hidden in a cape. New York City independent filmmaker Amos Poe lost his male lead, John Lurie, well into the filming of Subway Riders (1981). Lurie simply disappeared. Poe himself stepped into the lead role of the saxophone-playing serial killer, even though he looked nothing like Lurie. Since he also couldn’t play the saxophone, he just held it.
Underground filmmaker George Kuchar goes one step further when confronted with the loss of a key actor: he writes the event into the film and actually finds it inspiring. Instead of substituting a cape-draped face a la Wood, he substituted his own naked buttocks when the Puerto Rican lead actress refused to do a nude scene in his 1962 film Night of the Bomb.
It would not be the last time an actress refused to shoot a provocative scene for George, but no roadblock erected by feminine modesty could impede the steamrolling progress of one of his scripts once a downhill momentum had been gained and the brakes had been greased by reams of florid dialogue. No setback was insurmountable.
In fact, setbacks could be turned into successes, as George went about the black magic of low-budget filmmaking. In his 1987 film Summer of No Return, George had to make the beautiful lead actress disappear, as he remembers, "because she didn’t trust me — she thought I made dirty movies. She thought I was trying to get too much flesh from her. So we had her character burned in a fire and put in a hospital, and that advanced the plot because now we knew that her beautiful young suitor was to struggle to become a plastic surgeon and fix up her from now on bandage-draped face. He had to get money so he delved into the underworld, became a hustler and a drug addict and then had to clean up his act — all to get money so he could train as a plastic surgeon to rebuild her face. So, thanks to her, the plot advanced considerably."
In George’s best-known film, Hold Me While I’m Naked, the lead actress caught pneumonia after spending hours in a drafty shower, and left. The scene was filmed and written into the movie to help add drama and direction.
 George and Mike Kuchar — young filmmakers  |
No art form demands as much spontaneous, imaginative improvisation as low-budget filmmaking, and no American low-budget filmmakers are as imaginative as George Kuchar and his twin brother Mike. Major figures in the American Underground film movement of the ’sixties, they are the acknowledged pioneers of the camp/pop aesthetic that would influence practically all who came after them, from Warhol and Waters to Vadim and Lynch. That influence is still being felt.
In the Beginning God Created the Bronx
Born in Manhattan in 1942, the brothers moved to the Bronx at an early age. There the tenement blocks, TV-antenna-studded rooftops, bleak blue winters, and littered streets of New York City’s northernmost borough would become their familiar world. A world that they, like most adolescents, wanted to escape. Failing that, they would remake it, colorize it, drape it in cheap tinsel and leopard skins.
The nearby Bronx Park and the Bronx Botanical Gardens offered temporary refuge from the hostile city streets. George would take long, solitary walks in the wilder, more remote areas of the park, to discover idyllic waterfalls and fast-running streams splashing over rocks.
Young George was also keen on violent storms. "Since I was born in a city and lived in a city, New York, all my life, I worshipped nature and storms — anything that disrupted the city in a ‘nature way’." Tornados were a particular fascination that would figure literally and metaphorically in his cinema. (George’s 1961 film A Town Called Tempest has a remarkable sequence of a tornado destroying a town.) "I think in the ’50s a big tornado had gone through Worcester, Massachusetts, and there was talk about it in New York. It was in the news and for some reason it excited me. The great storm smashing up towns and blowing into people’s lives, changing them."
Other, less naturalistic forms of destruction were then taking place in the Bronx as whole tracts of land not far from the Kuchar home were being cleared to make way for the construction of the infamous Cross Bronx Expressway. Debris-strewn blocks of abandoned buildings waiting for the wrecker’s ball provided illegal recreation for George, who delighted in pushing rusty refrigerators out of top floor fire exits to watch them explode in the rubble below.
George’s own neighbors were being pushed out of upper-story windows on the pages of his actively cluttered drawing pads where he developed a comic-book drawing style, and later, a style of painting that might be called "Vulgar Humanism au naturel." Mike also displayed drawing talent at a young age, and likewise eventually took up the painter’s brush to create a series of pictures in the vein of "Mystic-Classical." (Mike’s apex as a painter came with a series of compelling oil portraits that evoke a satanic eroticism at once evil and pleasurable, with muscular, leering jinns rendered in glowing bright colors.)
Mom was a housewife and Dad, as George describes him, "was a virile, sex-crazed truck driver who slept all day semi-nude, and lusted after booze, bosoms, and bazookas (having served in the Second World War)."
His dad’s taste in literature and cinema would have a profound effect on George, as he recalls in a 1989 interview: "In New York there were a lot of trashy novels on the bookstands, and my father was into reading trashy novels, or at least novels that were exciting to me — the artwork on the covers. That inspired a lot of imagery in my head. I loved the kind of sordidness of what it was like, evidently, to be grown up. It was a turn-on for me, I’d get excited looking at those paperback covers. And also the comic books. I think they twisted me also. I remember I used to be real disturbed when the heroes were captured, and whipped … and beaten, and …
"My dad also used to belong to a little film exchange group, he used to bring home the ‘red reels’ — red plastic reels of 8mm pornography. He had some pornographic books stuck away in his drawer, too, and when I was a little kid I used to find them, and look, and was amazed and would laugh … these adults. The world of adults."
George’s later literary reminiscences of a Bronx childhood would throb with the same lurid glow that characterized his films. In an excerpt from a 1989 essay titled "Schooling," George relates: "Going to elementary school in the Bronx was a series of humiliations which featured Wagnerian women in an endless chorus of: ‘Keep your mouth shut,’ ‘Where’s your homework?’, and ‘Spit that gum out!’ The male teachers were much shorter than the females and whatever masculine apparatus they possessed was well concealed amid the folds of oversized trousers. After school my twin brother and I would escape to the cinema, fleeing from our classmates; urban urchins who belched up egg creams and clouds of nicotine. In the safety of the theater we’d sit through hour upon hour of Indian squaws being eaten alive by fire ants, debauched pagans coughing up blood as the temples of God crashed down on their intestines, and naked monstrosities made from rubber lumbering out of radiation-poisoned waters to claw the flesh off women who had just lost their virginity.
"When three hours were up we would leave the theater refreshed and elated, having seen a world molded by adults, a world we would eventually mature into. At home, supper simmered on the stove, smoking, bubbling, and making plopping sounds as blisters of nutritious gruel burst just like the volcanic lava in those motion pictures. Oh how I wanted to grow up real fast and be one of the adults who sacrificed half-naked natives to Krakatoa or dripped hot wax on a nude body that resembled Marie Antoinette."
The brothers virtually lived in the theaters, seeing everything that came out, seeing the same movies over and over ("We saw Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind something like 11 times when it first came out," says George) … rolling under the seats, climbing through the balconies, making games.
Bedsheets, Bathtubs, and the Bomb: First Film Productions
The brothers’ introduction to hands-on filmmaking came courtesy of an aunt who let them loose in a closet full of her 8mm vacation reels which they would watch and edit in sequences that followed their own logic.
For their 12th birthdays, they were given an 8mm DeJur movie camera. They immediately began to stage productions inspired by the epics they saw on the big screen. In a 1964 interview with critic Jonas Mekas, George describes one of these first films. "At the age of 12 I made a transvestite movie on the roof and was brutally beaten by my mother for having disgraced her and also for soiling her nightgown. She didn’t realize how hard it is for a 12-year-old director to get real girls in his movies. But that unfortunate incident did not end our big costume epics. One month later Mike and I filmed an Egyptian spectacle on the same roof with all the television antennas resembling a cast of skinny thousands. Our career in films had begun."
In a 1993 interview, Mike reflects on these earliest productions: "I forget what is actually the first one. Some of them we threw away. We did one, The Wet Destruction of the Atlantic Empire (1954) [often cited as the first. -Ed.], which had a flood at the end. We did matte paintings of the city and we stuck it in a fast-running stream and ran the camera in slow motion and it was like a flood. We had some friends dressed up in costumes which were really bed sheets."
These first films were largely improvised. Screwball (1957) was envisioned as one continuous love scene, but that got boring so they had the hero go insane and strangle the leading lady. The Thief and the Stripper (1959) typified a lasting Kucharian penchant for peddle-to-the-floor melodrama: an artist murders his wife after falling in love with a stripper, while the stripper falls in love with a burglar. All die violently as it turns out that the stripper is actually the sister of the murdered wife.
 Hold Me While I'm Naked |
Meanwhile, "real life" occasionally intruded on the brothers’ activities. In an excerpt from the essay "Schooling," George remembers his teenage years and the emergency brake his Catholic upbringing tried to apply to his sex drive: "Eventually I had to leave the Church as one warm, lonely afternoon I found myself kneeling in a pew praying for wild, disgusting sex. I was a teenager with a heavy inclination to explore my own groin, and the emissions threatened to put out the fire in the sacred heart of our Lord. I looked around me at the elderly ladies scattered here and there throughout the shadowed house of God and knew that they at least were in peace because they didn’t possess a big piece that defiantly poked holes in Christian dogma, demanding lubricated shortcuts to the Kingdom of Heaven. I fled from that place of holiness that warm, lonely afternoon and God answered my prayers: a young, suffering Christian was granted wild, disgusting sex. Praise be the Lord!"
Mike and George were both enrolled at the Manhattan School of Art and Design, which specialized in training for commercial art. Mike, who matured faster than George, eventually got his own apartment and adopted a "swinging lifestyle," as George terms it.
If George’s teenage years in the Bronx were the essence of adolescent desperation, he did find an emotional outlet in making movies. "I was social making movies. It was my one connection with other people. I used to show my pictures at friends’ houses, at parties. I’d go to the house of friends, they’d be in the cast and I’d shoot the film. A week later we’d come back with the film developed and show them the rushes and shoot more, then maybe a week after that I’d edit it all together and we’d have a party and show the finished film."
 Donna Kerness and Janis Jones in Born of the Wind |
Many of these film parties were held over in Queens, at the house of a high school classmate who would later become their best-known "movie star": Donna Kerness. A dancer and aspiring model, Donna had a way of moving and expressing herself. She had an indefinable resonance onscreen, but also other more definable attributes: "She had big bazooms," recalls George, "and she had a very nice face. She could act. She had a style about her. So I put her in movies. All my Bronx buddies were excited about her — they thought her a great sensation. So I milked her: I went over to her house and we began to put her in bathtub scenes, where she wore a bathing suit, of course — the straps were pulled down. We simulated the tawdry stuff that I used to see on the big screen."
Some of the topical scandals and phobias of the day found expression in the brothers’ films. Their film Night of the Bomb, for example, plays as an 8mm take on the Cuban Missile Crisis that ends in an all-destroying explosion. "When the bomb was supposed to go off, all we did was put chairs on top of the actors as if they were debris — we tried to tangle them up in chairs," Mike says.
Such violent, apocalyptic endings were common to most of their early 8mm films, for example the all-consuming fire at the end of Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof (1961). "All those movies end in fire," recalls George, "horror pictures … the house collapses. We tried to make big spectacular endings."
"The bomb in Night of the Bomb," adds Mike, "was a vehicle to use as a spectacular image — people in conflict — otherwise it’s hard to make a narrative if something dramatic doesn’t happen."
The brothers scored these 8mm films with soundtracks laid down on reel-to-reel tapes that ran in loose sync. The music they chose reflected their love of ’50s big screen composers like Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman, and Alex North, but all sorts of other audio oddities ended up mulched into their soundtracks, oddball cuts pillaged from a vast record collection they began amassing in their early teens which is still a resource in scoring productions.
The tape soundtracks to some of these earliest films have badly degraded. "It’s been many years," says Mike, "they’re like mummies now." George recently began transferring some of these 8mm films onto video in San Francisco. The original and sometimes defective soundtrack tapes were in the Bronx in his mom’s closet (along with the original prints), so he ended up composing new soundtracks for Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof and Tootsies in Autumn (1963).
These 8mm productions (1954-1963) percolate with the influences of just about everything that hit the screen during this period. Of the Hollywood directors, Douglas Sirk was a major inspiration, along with Otto Preminger, Howard Hawks, and Frank Tashlin, to name but a few. Special effects artists like Ray Harryhausen and Willis O’Brien also had a big impact. But just as important, if not more so, were the B and Z grade horror and sci-fi films of directors like Roger Corman, Albert Zugsmith, and Jack Arnold. Studios like Allied Artists, Astor, and especially American International Pictures (AIP) were key to this exploitation boom that would reach a peak in 1957—58. AIP alone released 42 pictures over this two-year period, including titles like Voodoo Woman, The Astounding She Monster, Attack of the Puppet People, and The Screaming Skull. Mike and George saw most of them as their gray matter grew as polluted as the nearby Harlem River.
The brothers’ first public screenings took place at the 8mm Motion Picture Club, which met regularly in the function room of a Manhattan hotel. "It was run by fuddy-duddies," George recalls. "Everybody got dressed up and they showed their vacation footage. There’d be old ladies, and the old ladies would be sitting next to old men, and their stomachs would be acting up and making noises. And the old ladies would get offended at my movies because they were ‘irreverent,’ I guess. I was looking for … subject matter … and I’d pick anything out of the newspaper. That was after the Thalidomide scare came out and ladies were giving birth to deformed babies, and I made a comedy out of that (A Woman Distressed, 1962) — that was the last time I was at the 8mm Motion Picture Club, and it was the only time they ever gave a bad review to a movie."
NEXT PAGE: Slouching toward Avenue A
