Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Filmmaking on the Fringe The Good the Bad and the Deviant Directors by Maitland McDonagh Filmmaking on the Fringe: The Good the Bad and the Deviant Directors by Maitland McDonagh. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #89f97b50-cf3f-11eb-8633-4f5cd7aaf338 VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Thu, 17 Jun 2021 07:42:16 GMT. The Cinecultist's Weekly Repertory Pick: Bump in the Night Edition. Boo! It's time to hide your eyes and scream with delight over at the Museum of the Moving Image, as they'll be showing six weeks worth of old and new horror films starting tonight. You could say that scary stories are always about what metaphorical bogey men society fears most, but that became particularly evident in the horror films made during the '70s. In a panel discussion on Sunday at 4:30 pm, horror aficionados Nathan Lee ( The Village Voice ), Adam Lowenstein (author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film ), Maitland McDonagh (author of Filmmaking on the Fringe: The Good, the Bad, and the Deviant Directors ), and Joshua Rothkopf ( Time Out New York ) will be discussing with assistant curator Livia Bloom some of the most prevalent themes and preoccupations during that period. In addition this weekend they'll be screening such creepy favorites as Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (Sat. at 4 pm), Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects (Sun. at 6:30 pm), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Sun. at 2 pm) and Saw II (Sat. at 6:30 pm). It's not often that you can see such a wide range of horror movies put side by side, so be sure to take advantage of this well-programmed series. You never know what movie insights might come up from seeing Carrie (July 21 at 2 pm) and Ichi the Killer (July 15 at 4 pm) in close proximity. Other notable movie events happening this weekend include the kick off today of the 18th Human Right Film Festival at Lincoln Center, a short series devoted to landscape filmmaker James Benning at Anthology Film Archives, and tasty documentaries at the first annual Food Film Festival at the Water Taxi Beach. Also, a reminder that the first Bryant Park outdoor movie of the season is this coming Monday night and it's the very New York-centric break-up story Annie Hall . Maitland McDonagh. Maitland McDonagh / ˈ m eɪ t l ə n d m ᵻ k ˈ d ɒ n ə / is an American film critic and the author of several books about cinema. Contents. Biography. Early career. Born and raised in the New York City borough of Manhattan, McDonagh received her Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College and her Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, where she co-founded and edited the Columbia Film Review . [1] She was simultaneously working in the publicity department of the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine and Peter Martins, eventually becoming head of publicity. [1] McDonagh's Irish-emigrant grandparents owned The Moylan Tavern, comedian and habitué George Carlin's real-life basis for the same-name bar on the 1994-95 Fox Broadcasting sitcom The George Carlin Show . [2] [3] While writing articles and reviews for numerous publications, including Film Comment , Film Quarterly , Premiere , Entertainment Weekly , and Fangoria , McDonagh published her first book, the auteur study Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento (1991), which grew out of her master's thesis. Later career. After leaving New York City Ballet to pursue a writing career, McDonagh taught film as an adjunct professor at Hunter College and Brooklyn College, during which time she completed Filmmaking on the Fringe: The Good, The Bad, and the Deviant Directors and The 50 Most Erotic Films of All Time . Her freelance work during this period included film pieces for The New York Times . She became senior movie editor of the TV Guide website in 1995, while continuing to contribute essays to such anthologies as the British Film Institute's The BFI Companion to Horror (Cassell, 1996), Fantasy Females (Stray Cat Publishing, 2000), Zombie (Stray Cat Publishing, 2000), and The Last Great American Picture Show (Amsterdam University Press, 2004), as well as to numerous film guides. In the mid-2000s, she wrote an occasional column on dance movies for the British magazine Dance Now . Her book Movie Lust , third in the Sasquatch Books series begun with Book Lust by Nancy Pearl and Music Lust by Nic Harcourt, was published August 28, 2006. Later that year, she became the founding vice-president of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. [4] She is also a member of the New York Film Critics Online. [5] McDonagh wrote the TV Guide website's twice-weekly column FlickChick ; helped initiate the magazines weekly podcast, TV Guide Talk ; and co-starred with fellow editor/critic Ken Fox in a Friday vodcast, Movie Talk . [1] She left TV Guide in October 2008 and subsequently launched the website Miss FlickChick [6] and its accompanying blog. [7] Publishing. In 2014 McDonagh created the company 120 Days Books to republish rare 1970s and 1980s gay-erotica genre novels, beginning with a pair of two-in-one volumes: the crime thrillers Man Eater and Night of the Sadist and the supernatural fantasies Vampire's Kiss and Gay Vampire . [8] [9] Other work. McDonagh provides interviews and second-channel commentary on DVD / Blu-ray releases, including for director Paul Schrader's Blue Collar , and liner notes, including for the Criterion Collection releases The Tunnel , The Innocents [10] Kuroneko [11] and the paired Corridors of Blood/The Haunted Strangler , [12] and Arrow Video's Dressed to Kill. [13] She contributed weekly commentary as the American correspondent for British Armed Forces Radio in 2004. [1] Panels and documentary appearances. McDonagh has appeared on panels for the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of the Moving Image. [14] She has lectured at the Huntington (New York) Arts Center, the Jyväskylä (Finland) Arts Festival, and elsewhere, and speaks at horror-film conventions, reflecting one of her specialties. She also specializes in erotic cinema, appearing as an expert in that capacity in the documentary The 100 Greatest Sexy Moments for the UK's Channel Four. [15] Other television appearances include NBC's Today and G4's Filter , and such documentaries as Scream and Scream Again: A History of the Slasher Film for the BBC; [16] Night Bites: Women and Their Vampires for WE: Women's Entertainment; [17] Dario Argento: An Eye for Horror for IFC; [18] and the Bravo miniseries 100 Scariest Movie Moments and its 2006 sequel, 30 Even Scarier Movie Moments ; 2008's Zombiemania ; [19] and, in 2009, Pretty Bloody: The Women of Horror , for Canada's Space network. [20] Film festival juries. McDonagh served on the five-member jury judging films in competition at the 2008 New York Asian Film Festival [21] and on the jury as well for the 2008 New York City Horror Film Festival. [22] In the media. A character in one scene of writer-director Lucky McKee's movie May (2002) can be seen reading McDonagh's Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds , as does the character Domini in the final issue (#18, April 1994) of the Marvel Comics supernatural series Nightstalkers . “That Guy Who Made Re-Animator Got Disney Back Into Family Films”: Stuart Gordon’s Journey to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Stuart Gordon died yesterday. I wrote a reflection on his career, focusing more in his theater beginnings and Re-Animator. You can read it here. Below is the article I wrote two years ago about Gordon’s improbable and ultimately brief flirtation with family film. In 1992, Spain’s fantasy/horror-themed Sitges Film Festival invited director Stuart Gordon to sit on the festival jury alongside The Exorcist actress Ellen Burstyn and legendary Star Wars make-up artist Stuart Freeborn. It was actually a bit of a homecoming for Gordon. Less than a decade earlier, his debut feature Re-Animator won the festival’s top prize, and while he’d made a handful of horror/sci-fi flicks since then, he’d also detoured into family fare, co-writing 1989’s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids . That film’s sequel – Honey, I Blew Up the Kids – was actually in theaters when Gordon arrived at Sitges. The Honey franchise was obviously a far cry from the type of movies competing at the festival. 1992, remember, was the year of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive . Gordon – drawing on his years of experience in experimental theater – exploded out of the gate as someone primed to push horror movie boundaries and shock audiences. 7 years later, even he was shocked by what these new young guys were up to – Tarantino cutting off someone’s ear in a scene almost too real to bear and Jackson taking a literal lawn mower to a room full of zombies. “I had always thought Re-Animator held the all-time record for blood spilling,” Gordon later explained. “We used thirty gallons of fake blood. So I asked Peter how much blood he had used, and the answer was three thousand gallons.” The future of genre filmmaking was right there in front of him: disturbing realism or the ever-escalating splatter arms race. You confront audiences with imagery so believable it makes them uncomfortable or you figure out just how many gallons of blood it will take to disgust them. Gordon wanted a third option. Heck, he wanted a fourth option too. Whatever horror movies he made in the future couldn’t match Tarantino or Jackson, but before returning to the genre he loved, he wanted to at least try his hand as a family film guy. Thanks to Honey, he actually had an office at the intersection of Dopey Drive and Mickey Avenue on the Disney lot. Few on the lot, one imagines, likely realized Gordon was the guy who once directed a scene in which a zombie lowers its severed head onto a completely naked, shrieking Barbara Crampton. How the heck did that guy end up a Disney employee? The short version: He had kids. No, seriously, that’s it. So often in film history, a director, actor, or producer’s sudden change in direction simply comes down to, “I wanted to finally make something my kids could watch.” That impulse is what led Gordon to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids . When he made Re-Animator , his directing debut after years spent running Chicago’s Organic Theater Company, Gordon already had two young daughters at home. His wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, who has a small part in the film as Bruce Abbott’s hospital supervisor, actually had to fly back home to Chicago to take care of the kids. Two years later, when Gordon had to travel to Europe to make Dolls (as well as the Lovecraft adaptation From Beyond ) one of his daughters visited the set, saw a room full of dolls, and thought, “Which one of these can I take home with me?” Nevermind that in the plot of the film they are evil dolls, spoiler , miniaturized versions of tourists unlucky enough to happen upon a demented old couple’s countryside home. Having already zeroed in on the doll she wanted, she asked, “Dad? Are all of these dolls bad?” When he confirmed her suspicion, she hopefully offered, “Even this one here, with the white buttons?” It wasn’t. Obviously. Gordon gave her the doll. She held on to it for years. The film managed just fine without it. The experience stuck with him, though. When your daughter asks about a cute doll on your film set, should she really have to ask, “Is that one evil?” When his family subsequently grew from two daughters to three, he pursued working at Disney. Not surprisingly, the next title in his filmography after Dolls is Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and that transition started with his old Re-Animator producer Brian Yuzna. The concept. “I remember really clearly how it all began. I was with Brian Yuzna in his backyard, and he was really upset because his kids had gone to see a movie called The Journey of Natty Gann , which was directed by a neighbor (Jeremy Kagan) whose kids went to the same school as they did. The director’s kids invited the entire class to come to an advance screening, and Brian’s kids came home afterward and said, ‘Dad, how come we never get to see any of your movies,’ which knocked his nose a little out of joint. That said, Brian will actually show his kids anything. He had his son sitting in on the dailies for Re-Animator , which I couldn’t have imagined doing with my daughters. My eldest daughter loves horror films, but my middle daughter, the one who wanted the doll with the white buttons, is terrified by them, and the slightest little thing will set her off and give her nightmares. Brian’s kids seem to be fine; they aren’t axe-murders, at least not as far as I now…But anyway, his movies weren’t the kind of thing you’d invite a whole class full of other people’s children to, and that was what got to Brian. The above quotes is excerpted from Gordon’s early 90s interview in Maitland McDonagh’s Filmmaking on the Fringe: The Good, The Bad, and the Deviant Directors. Unless otherwise noted, that’s where all of the subsequent quotes come from as well. So we started talking about it, saying, “Why don’t we come up with an idea for a movie our kids could see?” And we started talking about little kids playing in the backyard, because that’s where we were having this discussion. And all of a sudden this idea kind of came together, about kids who get shrunk so they’re teeny-tiny and the adventures they have trying to get across the yeard, and we brought it over to Disney. It’s hard to remember this now given Disney’s current blob-like swallowing of the entire film indusry, but back in those days the Mouse House was in dire straits. As Gordon observed in his 2016 Talk House column “My Adventures with Katzenberg”: The Disney name was so tarnished that there was even talk of changing its name to Touchstone, and abandoning the family films that were then deemed to be box-office poison. This included discontinuing the animated films after their most recent effort The Black Cauldron had cratered. But Roy E. Disney, who had hired Eisner, insisted that they continue making the cartoons that put the studio on the map and retain the Disney moniker. “If you want the cartoons so badly,” Eisner had reportedly told Roy, “then you do them.” But the animators were thrown out of the Animation Building to make room for the likes of Bette Midler and Richard Dreyfuss who starred in the lower budgeted comedies that Eisner felt could keep the studio alive. Into that mess walks the guys who made Re-Animator, ready to pitch an idea about a scientist who accidentally shrinks his kids. The Pitch. Dolls screenwriter Ed Naha’s was recruited to convert their idea into a script, and his original treatment was 70 pages long; Disney, which was first turned onto the project through a junior executive named David Hoberman, offered back over 100 pages worth of notes. Several months and countless rewrites passed before the trio were finally invivited in to meet Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had been marking up their scripts with rather blunt criticisms. As Gordon recalls at Talk House, “‘Welcome to the first production meeting for Teenie Weenies ,’ Katzenberg began. Brian Yuzna and I looked at each other. Were we actually in production? ‘Clearly we need to find a new title,’ he continued.” The Title. It’s adorable they ever thought The Teenies Weenies was a title that would stick. Katzenberg immediately cut to the heart of he problem, beginning the meeting with the following joke: “ Teenie Weenies – is the title autobiographical?” Gordon offered an alt-title option – The Itsy-Bitsies – which was similarly rejected. Somebody in the marketing department actually came up with Honey, I Shrunk the Kids , which was as perfect a Katzenberg title as you could find. Again, Gordon looking back on it in 2016: “Jeffrey likes titles that tell the audience what the movie is about. Not everyone liked the new title (including me) and I remember one producer reminding Jeffrey that Rain Man wasn’t called My Retarded Brother . But of course he was proven right about Honey , as the title has become a part of our national vernacular and the set up to a million jokes.” The Nosebleed. Settling on the right title was but the first of countless battles. Breakfast meetings were scheduled for 7AM at the start of production; by the end, those meetings started at 5 AM thanks to Katzenberg’s pledge to not waste a single minute every day. Anyone who complained about working on Saturdays was simply told not to worry about coming on Sunday either because they were fired. Katzenberg’s notes on the script were often insane, like demanding the shrunken kids encounter a pile of dog shit in the back yard the size of the Beverly Center. But they were also sometimes helpful, with his suggestion to have the kids trapped in a shopping cart which is being bombarded with grocery items (as a means for budget- ligthening production placement opportunities) directly inspiring Gordon to create the film’s most iconic scene: But the gruelling schedule and constant back-and-forth took its toll on Gordon: The movie was going to happen, and I was going to direct it. We went into pre-production and planned it all out, and worked with the designers, found a director of photography, got all the effects people on board. And about two weeks before we were going to start shooting, I got sick and had to drop out. By “got sick” he means he suffered a rather horrific-sounding nosebleed during a production meeting. A doctor told him the bleed was caused by a combination of stress, Katzenberg’s iron-fisted leadership style finally getting to him, and high blood pressure. The movie Gordon only ever wanted to make to give his daughters something they could watch was going to kill him. Literally. The doctor actually used the phrase “you’ll die if you make this movie.” That turned the decision into a no-brainer: Gordon had to back away and get healthy rather than risk leaving his kids without a father. The Replacement. I was replaced by Joe Johnston, who pretty much inherited all this work I had done. He didn’t really have much breathing room; they wanted to make the schedule, so he took all the planning we had done and made the movie. And I’m glad he was very faithful to our concepts; there were a few departures, but for the most part it was really our movie. And then the movie did extremely well. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was actually Johnston’s directorial debut after spending a decade working in visual effects at LucasFilm. Honey’ s success launched him into a decade of full of family-friendly entertainment like The Rocketeer (1991), Jumanji (1995), and October Sky ( 1999). Now, he’s most known for directing Captain America: The First Avenger . Gordon was happy with Johnston’s work on Honey , but it was still a bittersweet pill to swallow: High blood pressure is curable, so I had to get healthy. In a way the incident was a good thing, because it made me deal with my health. But i’d be lying if I denied that it was also a huge disappointment, especially when Honey, I Shrunk the Kids became this blockbuster. Still, ultimately, I can’t complain; it’s done great things for me. What do you mean he saved the Disney family film? At the time Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was made, calling something a family film was kind of the kiss of death. Anything called a family film was nowhere; even Disney stopped making them. As a matter of fact, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was the first live-action Disney, as opposed to Touchstone, film that had been made in ten years. I thought that was great. Gordon’s reward was an office on the Disney lot, fulfilling a childhood dream, “Walt Disney himself always used to say that they didn’t make kids’ movies, they made family films. That was a big production in his mind: that Disney made movies that had things in them that everyone could enjoy together, the whole family. So he didn’t want the movies just to be kiddie pablum.” Sadly, there is no Joe Johnston-like “and then he made a bunch of family films we all love” postscript to this story. Gordon’s deal with Disney proved fruitless (various projects worked on went unproduced), and his filmography returned to sci-fi ( Space Truckers ) and horror ( The Pit and the Pendulum, Dagon, Masters of Horror ), though never to the extremes of Re-Animator . But at least he walked away from it with one movie to his name which he could happily watch with his kids. MAITLAND MCDONAGH: IN PURSUIT OF DARIO ARGENTO. Twenty-five years ago, Maitland McDonagh created her first version of “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento.” Since then, McDonagh has authored four books and has been one of the most recognized film critics in the US media – she was senior movies editor for TV Guide Online, editor of AMCtv’s Horror Hacker site and a contributor to Film Comment and Time Out New York . However, McDonagh kept returning to Argento’s work over the past 25 years. Her latest edition of “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds” is being published by the University of Minnesota Press. Film Threat caught up with McDonagh at the New York office of her online media site MissFlickChick.com to discuss Argento and her fascination with his output. What is the genesis of the original edition of this book? And why did you decide to revisit it after 15 years? The very first version of “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds” was my Columbia University master’s thesis, which I wrote in 1985. It was very academic, but at the same time I was writing I was collecting stills, posters, lobby cards, slides and ad mattes – that was fun. When I rewrote my thesis into the first book version of “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds,” which was published in 1990 by a then-new, UK-based house called sun tavern fields, all the stuff I’d acquired came in handy. The book covered Argento’s films from “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” to “Two Evil Eyes,” and I had illustrations for everything. Three years later, I got a contract to do “Filmmaking on the Fringe: The Good, the Bad and the Deviant Directors” – a series of interviews with horror filmmakers ranging from Wes Craven to Fred Olen Ray – for Citadel Books, and a US edition of “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds” was bundled into the deal. That was the second edition, which was updated through Trauma. About a year and a half ago, University of Minnesota Press contacted me about doing yet another edition of “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds.” Argento had made seven features since the previous one, so it was an opportunity to update again. Argento’s body of work is now twice the size it was when I started out. For those who are not familiar with Dario Argento’s works, what could be considered the essentials of his canon and what could be considered his under-appreciated gems? The essentials are “Deep Red” (1975), “Suspiria” (1977), “Tenebrae” (1982) and “Opera” (1987). If you don’t like them, Argento isn’t your cup of tea. For me, the underrated gem is “Stendhal Syndrome” (1996), which stars Argento’s daughter, Asia. It’s a polarizing film: People who hate it, including a lot of longtime fans, really, really hate it. But it walks the wire between unnerving beauty and seductive horror with incredible grace. How has Argento’s work influenced contemporary filmmakers? The roots of slasher movies lie in Agatha Christie’s 1939 “Ten Little Indians” by way of Mario Bava’s 1964 “Blood and Black Lace.” But Argento really refined and codified the high end of the body-count spectrum: Everything from “Halloween” to “Saw” – movies that launched two of the biggest horror franchises in history – owe Argento big time, from their use of music to the staging of their elaborately constructed murder sequences. How is Argento viewed in his native Italy, versus how he is viewed in the USA? I think the critical take on Argento is pretty much the same the world over: He’s been very high profile in genre circles from the start – although European cineastes noticed him before their Americans counterparts did – but in mainstream circles he’s still largely ignored and abhorred. At best, he’s lauded as camp: I heard a lot of that when “Mother of Tears” was released and don’t believe it for a second. Argento is very serious about what he does. Anyway, the difference is that in the USA, Argento is a cult icon, while in Italy he’s a bona fide celebrity. Back at the beginning of his career he created a short-lived TV series called “La Porta sul Buio.” Each episode was a standalone suspense story and he introduced them onscreen a la Alfred Hitchcock. Because of “La Porta,” people who’ve never seen an Argento movie know who he is – like my Italian father-in-law’s age- appropriate lady friend, who was beyond impressed when she first saw the “Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds” poster Dario inscribed to me. And now he’s also Asia Argento’s father; again, Asia has a certain cache here, but in Italy she’s huge – like some bizarre fusion of Paris Hilton and Natalie Portman. Above and beyond all that, she’s astonishingly talented: “Scarlet Diva” is a breathtaking debut and “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things” is a chilling evocation of the place where tenderness intersects narcissism.