WEIRD WEEKEND 2024, taking place Friday 25th to Sunday 27th of October at OFFLINE, Glasgow’s newest multi-arts venue, presents exclusive restorations, world premieres, international guests and special events as it brings strange cinema to the local audience.
The festival’s main theme is THE OBSERVER EFFECT, exploring the outsider perspective of cult cinema and cult audiences, the relationship between viewer and film, film-maker and medium, and the blurring of all lines. The festival also considers films that can’t be seen at all, from Batgirlto Goncharov, in the complementary NO-FILM PROGRAMME of commissioned video essays and related gallery show, exploring unmade films.
World premieres include the 25th Anniversary 4K restoration of Treasure Island (Scott King, 1999), starring Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation, The Last of Us) and the 4K preservation of Screamplay (Rufus Butler Seder, 1984), commissioned by Weird Weekend from the director’s own print, in celebration of the film’s 40th anniversary.
Opening and Closing Nights give the audience control, with Make Good Choices: An Evening of Interactive Cinema celebrating the unpredictable world of choose your own adventure movies, and Overchoice: The 5-2-1 Gamepresenting the audience with the first five minutes of five unfamiliar films and then the option of which to watch together.
Nick Offerman in Treasure Island (Scott King, 1999)
In-person guests include Treasure Islanddirector Scott King; UNSEEcurator Louise Weard (Computer Hearts, Castration Movie); and Jaye Hudson (TGirlsOnFilm), to deliver an extended introduction to the Scottish premiere of “lost” midnight movie musical Scarecrow In a Garden of Cucumbers (Robert J Kaplan, 1972).
UNSEE is Weird Weekend’s annual mystery 60-minute slot taking place in the hour before the clocks go back (i.e. 1am to 1am), this year curated by Canadian director Louise Weard, whose epic Castration Movie leads in to UNSEE.
Other events include a 40th anniversary screening of The Residents’ Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats? (1984), with exclusive, never-before-seen, newly restored footage from their abandoned Vileness Fatsproject; The Woman Chaser (Robinson Devor, 1999), another “lost” 1999 title, with Family Guy’s Patrick Warburton as a car salesman turned Hollywood auteur; a very rare screening of The Big Blue (Andrew Horn, 1988), an “eclipsed film” of undeserved obscurity due to the name and release year it shareswith the better-known Luc Besson film; a double bill of The Pendragon Legend(1974) andThe Loves of a Dilettante(1973), two Antal Szerb adaptations from Hungarian director György Révész (the latter is translated into English for the first time and the former is a bizarre, gothic mystery set in England and Wales, with an entirely Hungarian cast); Vera Drew presents the Weird Weekend Wildcard; and more.
Weird Weekend offers sliding scale tickets, so audiences choose what to pay according to their means (from zero to £8 for single tickets), and descriptive subtitles and optional audio description on the entire programme, so the event can be as accessible as possible.
Film-maker Daniel Cockburn, in The Invocation (2024)
This year’s festival has a complementary No-Film Programme, considering films that can’t be seen, because they’re lost, withdrawn, fragmentary, never-made or completely imaginary. We commissioned film-maker Daniel Cockburn to produce a pair of video essays considering the Goncharov phenomenon and the vanished, Glasgow-filmed Batgirl.
THE INVOCATION We know what it’s like to procrastinate on a project by surfing the net, letting yourself fall down hyperlink rabbit holes. At least I do. But what do you do when a project requires you to surf the net, when the essential task is to purposely fall down a rabbit hole?
What if you’re making a video essay about the Goncharov phenomenon, that Tumblr thing from a few years back where suddenly everyone started pretending that there was a Scorsese/Garrone movie from 1973 with Robert De Niro and Cybill Shepherd about the Russian Mafia in Naples, and the internet filled with reminiscences and discussions and exegeses on the topic of this movie that never existed, and now if you care to, you can find endless dissection of its themes and enumerations of its motifs and readings of its coded sexual politics, and so if you need to make a video essay about that, the only way forward is down the rabbit hole, so I repeat my question, what do you do?
If doing the job is surfing and losing yourself in the unending chain of not-really-free association, then every moment of attempted productivity feels like it’s actually just procrastination, and you feel that familiar shame and guilt of avoiding work even though you’re actually working – but if you want to escape that feeling, what do you do? Procrastinate and surf the net? What a mess.
The Abjuration (Daniel Cockburn, 2024)
THE ABJURATION also can we pls talk about the word “canon” and what it used to mean vs what it means now and whether the cultures of fandom and corporate IP have a little more influence on our language & thought than would be optimal xthxbai
Daniel Cockburn
The Invocation and The Abjuration can be viewed in our No-Film Programme, which screens on a loop throughout our festival weekend. The Invocation will also screen with our opening night event, Make Good Choices: An Evening of Interactive Cinema, and The Abjuration with our closing night event, Overchoice: The 5-to-1 Game.
Daniel Cockburn is a Canadian moving-image artist based in Glasgow. His work deals with rhythm, language, and thought experiments, drawing on sources spanning video games, literature, power ballads, and sci-fi/fantasy/horror. His 2010 feature film You Are Here has been described as “a new kind of narrative for a new technological era” (Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope), “a major discovery” (Olivier Père, Locarno Film Festival), and “a whatsit” (Gavin Smith, Film Comment). He’s currently working on a live performance about medieval music and a movie adaptation of Mark Vonnegut’s memoir The Eden Express.
In popular parlance it’s usually a title unavailable on streaming, Blu-Ray, DVD or VHS. But anyone who has spent serious time in the world of repertory film programming has probably found themselves enticed by at least one rarity even further afield the typical means of film distribution – say, the difference between an out-of-print DVD or VHS and a title that never made it to home video in the first place. No surprise that a lot of the work of film programming ends up being detective work: tracking down whatever stray bits and bobs of information can be located about the last known public screening, cold-messaging internet accounts who appear to have inexplicable access to a digital copy (or just some still images), knocking on the doors of museums or archives, perhaps even harassing the filmmaker (or their surviving friends/family) on social media.
The urge to organize a movie screening is inherently quixotic, and demands meeting any and all obstacles with a deranged willingness to keep pushing, to seek alternative means. There’s only one way to find out if these kinds of initiatives will get the goods, and oftentimes they don’t. Sometimes the only thing that comes to light is a hard, tangible reason why the film in question is so impossible to track down: an ancient legal contract betrayed, a few seconds of expensive private-domain music used without consent, an embarrassed actor who has since grown powerful enough to suppress the whole operation. (There’s also the issue of whether or not the film is worth a damn. Every programmer has a story like this: you spend years hunting for something, you finally track it down – possibly after soliciting the attention and interest of its makers – and then, when you finally get a chance to see it, you realize it’s not very good.)
Doomed Love (Andrew Horn, 1984)
It was (relatively) easy to find Andrew Horn’s 1984 anti-musical Doomed Love. I was first alerted to the film’s existence by the IMDb page of composer Evan Lurie, member of the seminal New York jazz outfit The Lounge Lizards (alongside his more famous brother John.) A single still image showed the actor and painter Bill Rice (another fixture of the downtown avant-garde) sitting opposite a redheaded nurse in a set that looked like something from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari– postmodern art deco in extremis. I found Horn on Facebook; in the 1990s he had relocated to Berlin after finding his beloved East Village (and the city at large) a bit too watered-down and yuppified. I realized I had already seen Horn’s Klaus Nomi documentary The Nomi Song in theaters a decade earlier, as a teenager in Seattle; its rigorous documentation of a bygone world intensified my dreams of moving East and becoming a wild bohemian. It felt like Horn and I were already connected.
“I wanted to make an opera – without much knowledge of what opera was – and it became a musical,” Horn explained via email. “I wanted to make something mythic and only later discovered just how personal it was. I wanted it to be on a grand scale, which could only play out in a confined and artificial space. In those days we perversely wanted to alienate the audience and dare them to leave. In that I (thankfully) failed miserably.” Indeed, Doomed Love played at Spectacle, the tiny all-volunteer microcinema in Brooklyn where I have done the majority of my programming, and became – to the extent possible in such a confined, off-the-beaten-path space – something of a hit. The Lurie music helped, as did the diorama-like 2D sets by Amy Sillman (who went on to become a world famous painter) and the sui generis patois of Jim Neu’s screenplay, maddeningly repetitive yet beguiling and enveloping.
So far, so good: more than a few people told me Doomed Love was their favorite of the films I had ever programmed. Horn acquiesed to reviving the film for additional shows, with Nomi Song added alongside his 2014 documentary We Are Twisted Fucking Sister!, an epic paean to the stick-to-it-ive-ness of Twisted Sister (who, like Horn, hailed innocuously from the suburbs of Long Island.) Horn came to the theater in 2018 for fervently attended Q&As. I thought the relationship was percolating beautifully, but whenever I sent questions about his followup to Doomed Love – something listed on the internet as The Big Blue, from 1988, with no images or video artifacts to prove it really existed – Horn went quiet.
Posters for Doomed Love (Andrew Horn, 1984) and The Big Blue (Andrew Horn, 1988)
I would later learn that Horn’s Big Blue suffered at least one misfortune I wouldn’t wish on any filmmaker in the world, which is the contemporaneous release of a radically different and far more successful film with the same title, in the same year. It sounds funny but is in fact sad that Horn was credited in New YorkMagazine as the director of a different The Big Blue, Luc Besson’s wildly popular but utterly different romance about a deep sea diver who can communicate, as if by telepathy, with dolphins. Besson’s story is well known, and the flamboyance of his fame is matched today by the alleged monstrosity of his abuses of power.
Andrew Horn’s Big Blue was a beleaguered coproduction between the German public broadcasting network ZDF and Angelika Films, a new production outfit that grew from the success of the storied (and still-open) movie theater on Manhattan’s Houston Street, operated by Joseph Saleh. In our talks, Horn alluded to tremendous frustration with the pressures of making a bigger-budget film, and – after much badgering – rather defensively deemed his Big Blue little more than a failed experiment. When we finally met in person after those 2018 screenings, he described the confusion around Besson’s movie as a sign from fate, the last nail in the coffin.
Doomed Love (Andrew Horn, 1984)
So here was a new twist, a filmmaker actively wishing I would not show (or ask them about) one of their completed works. (The only other time this has happened to me was when Louise Greaves, widow of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One director William Greaves,refused to entertain the idea of excavating Greaves’ beyond-rare contribution to the Blaxploitation genre, a Jamaica-shot thriller called The Marijuana Affair starring the great Calvin Lockhart.)
But I pressed on. And at the end of our first and last encounter, Horn begrudgingly agreed to send me a DVD of his Big Blue. “Maybe you’ll get something out of it I didn’t,” he mused. We shook hands. He never sent it. And within a year he died of lymphoma. Horn knew he was sick; he had returned to New York because he was racing against time to complete a documentary about the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, the experimental theater group founded by artist Robert Wilson; this is where he met some of his closest collaborators such as Jim Neu (screenwriter/star of Doomed Love and The Big Blue.) I began contacting people about a memorial retrospective: Neu’s widow Carol Mullins (lighting designer for his Off-Off-Broadway theater works), Horn’s former partner Hisami Kuroiwa (an esteemed producer of independent film in her own right, and the driving force of our 2020 memorial retrospective), Amy Sillman and cinematographer Carl Teitelbaum, who also worked on Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys From Berlin/1971 and Landlord Blues, the 1988 feature by Horn’s downtown contemporary Jacob Burckhardt (son of the famous artist Rudy Burckhardt.)
Japanese press book for The Big Blue (Andrew Horn, 1988)
The aforementioned parties agreed we had to include The Big Blue in our series, and the movie did not disappoint. Its vision of loneliness was even more minutely detailed than that of Doomed Love; offset with jawdropping production design and a coy, deadpan sense of humor. So much of the story is about David Brisbin’s slippery private investigator enjoying a safe remove from the people he’s surveilling; indeed, the characters speak in self-satisfied code about the walls they’ve built around their lives, and for that it’s not hard to see the kinship with Doomed Love. But crucially, The Big Blue also shows what happens when those facades come crashing down. It’s especially sad the film is so hard to see, because it represents the apotheosis of Horn and Neu’s collaboration, although Hisami Kuroiwa told me they had collaborated on one last unproduced screenplay, described as even darker and more sophisticated. The mind reels.
The version of The Big Blue screening in this year’s Weird Weekend is the cleanest the film has looked since it was originally released. (In sourcing the film, we went through three different copies – Betacam, u-Matic and VHS – before producer Yoram Mandel found this one, which is still deeply imperfect.) But what’s the lesson of this story? For me it’s a tragedy, not unworthy of Doomed Love or The Big Blue, about an artist who was not the best judge of his own work. Only fair, but now work continues to find a way to share The Big Blue with new audiences.
Steve Macfarlane
The Big Blue screens at Weird Weekend on Sunday 27/10/24. Tickets available here.
Read/Subscribe to Steve Macfarlane’s Element X substack here.
In 1993, writer/cinematographer/director Scott King found a beat up 1950s paperback called The Man Who Never Was. It tells the true story of two British agents who procure a dead body, dress it up as an officer, chain a briefcase full of phony invasion plans to its wrist and drop it in the Mediterranean. The Germans found the body and proclaimed the intelligence in the briefcase to be “beyond reproach.” Adolf Hitler himself gave the order to move the troops according to the plans found in the briefcase.
While this may have been the most successful counterintelligence campaign of any war, that’s not the part of the story that interested Mr King. For as the two men executed their plan, they created a complete identity for their body, one so detailed that it included movie tickets, bank passbooks, and, finally, letters, both to and from the dead man.
“I was fascinated by the way these normal guys would unknowingly write these very poignant and emotional letters,” says King, “and by the way that the letters, without the writers meaning to, revealed things about themselves that the book only glosses over.”
Director Scott King with actors Lance Baker and Nick Offerman, on the set of Treasure Island
Mr King spent the next five years mostly on research (while admittedly doing other things), stealing liberally from everything he could find: a 1910 two-volume Psychologis Sexualis, a 1943 Slang Thesaurus, biographies of minor historical figures, ration magazines, 1970s self-help books. Mr King: “I wanted to invent an entire fake novel that the film would be based on, giving the characters and the story a depth that myself and the actors could refer to. For instance, I knew that Samuel (Nick Offerman) was a mathematician and, in an early draft, wrote a scene where he calculated exact change at a grocery store. The scene was pretty boring but the idea of his character rebelling against his bookish self-image in a kind of hyper masculine way did wind up in the movie, even though it wasn’t explicitly in the script.” After the years of noodling, the script itself only took a few months to write.
The five directors of Treasure Island, plus one
When it came time to actually shoot the film, producer Adrienne Gruben sought out people who had made their own films. Script supervisor Robert Byington had previously directed Shameless and Olympia, the latter which opened the 1998 South by Southwest Festival in Austin and closed the 1998 Slamdance Film Festival. Gaffer Philip Glau was the director of Circus Redickuless, a feature documentary about a punk rock circus which has also toured the festival route. Sound man Dante Harper directed The Delicate Art of the Rifle, which was honoured with Best Film at Chicago’s Underground Film Festival. First assistant director Abe Levy was the director of a film called Max 13, while camera operator Jonathan Sanford’s first film, The Big Charade, played a number of festivals, including South by Southwest.
Shortly after principal photography, producer Gruben told IndieWire, “I’ve noticed on films with first time directors that the crew sits around saying, ‘If I were making a movie, I’d do it this way.’ I didn’t want the crew against the director; I wanted some padding, so they’d all have some empathy for Scott in this situation. I hired people who I thought had matching personalities. I hired a bunch of diplomats, basically, who had training in certain departments.”
The crew of Treasure Island
Today, King would tell any first-time film-maker that the only way that they will ever make a halfway decent film is to surround themselves with talented people who really know what they are doing. “As a hopeless control freak, I was amazed at how people who believed in the project were able to stand up and do such an great job that I was unable to hate them for doing so. When it’s all over, there’s a tendency to forget what kind of cooperation it takes to make a film; I’m happy to be the spokesman of Treasure Island, but now that I’ve gone through the actual experience of making it, I have to admit I’m not the author.”
For the look of the film, the team wanted to create a glimpse into the ’40s that we had only suspected before. “A lot of people remember this day as a Life magazine photo,” says Mr King, “especially the one that depicts the sailor kissing a strange woman in the middle of a celebratory street. In reality, the last day of the war turned the country into Dallas when the Cowboys win: a near riot condition, where looting, rapes, random beatings and murder were not uncommon. I was hoping in the film to show what happens underneath the kiss in the photograph.”
Filming the VJ riot in Treasure Island
In order to shift today’s perspective of the 1940s, King wanted the film to look exactly like one that might have been made at the time. Shooting in black and white with a 1936 Mitchell camera and using old fashioned processing techniques, the cast and crew strived to create the feeling that, despite all beliefs to the contrary, people lived their lives pretty much the way they do now.
This attention to the look of the film continues off the set, where King and his production designer, Nathan Marsak, are obsessed with the period depicted in Treasure Island. in their day-to-day lives, they are surrounded by rotary phones and pneumatic tubes, interwar cars and chalk-stripe suits. As producer Gruben puts it. “Their preoccupation with detail and obsession with historical correctness bears no relation to anything ‘retro’, they don’t go swing dancing, they build dirigibles.” This attention to visual perfection creates a real environment where it’s possible, if only for one second, to see that people living 50 years ago swore, did the wrong thing, lived their lives with no hope of ever knowing themselves, and, yes, had sex.
Original Treasure Island trailer
Shooting wrapped in July of 1998, and as the crew finished up the editing, sound and music in November, the film was accepted into the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. This turned out to be an overwhelming experience for everyone involved. Film-maker King: “There are people who go to this festival expecting to see something they can market, commercial movies on a slightly lower budget. Treasure Island was not that kind of film and it made some people very, very angry. But I think a number of folks were happily surprised to be exposed to something, well, provocative. I didn’t enjoy being so vocally criticized, but when you know you’re getting to people, one way or another, it has to feel a little like a success.”
Despite the festival’s reputation for million-dollar napkin deals, Treasure Island was not the kind of film that distributors, even the smaller ones, were looking for. “We had a lot of a distributors who went out of their way to say how much they liked it”, said producer Adrienne Gruben. “I mean, they could have just run away and hid, so I don’t think they were lying. I think it’s the kind of film that works well for people who’ve seen a lot of movies, but there was an unspoken understanding that them liking it and the film making them a ton of money were two totally different things.”
Poster for Treasure Island‘s new 4K restoration, by Beth Morris
After winning a Special Jury prize at Sundance, an award for outstanding artistic achievement at Outfest in Los Angeles, and a IFP Independent Spirit nomination for best first feature (under $500,000)1, Treasure Island continued to screen at more festivals around the country, still unable to secure any kind of distribution deal. After finding theatres in New York and San Francisco who were willing to take a chance on a film without any money behind it, All Day Entertainment head David Kalat happened in on a screening in New York’s Cinema Village. Kalat, who has made a reputation for himself releasing lost classic films like Fritz Lang’s The Eyes of Dr Mabuse and ’70s cult masterpiece Ganja & Hess, has a great affinity for unseen films. “Even though the film takes place in 1945”, says Mr Kalat, “Treasure Island is the first contemporary film I’ve even wanted to put out [on DVD]. It’s not a film for everybody, but for the right audience, it really has the potential to disturb and enlighten.”
Scott King’s 25th anniversary, 4K restoration of Treasure Island premieres at Weird Weekend on Saturday 26/10, with post-screening Q&A. Tickets available here.
It was bested in this category by The Blair Witch Project↩︎
Katy Bolger as Holly, George Kuchar as Martin and Rufus Seder as Edgar, in Screamplay
Screamplay (1984) was the only feature length film I ever made, but it was not at all the first film. I had been making short films for almost 20 years (since I was 12 years old), many of them international award winners (Cannes, Krakow, Ann Arbor).
As a college student, I bounced back and forth between the East and West Coast. First, I was a film student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, where I met and collaborated with other film students. Then, I was a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute in Lost Angeles, where I met actor Ed Greenberg and with whom I co-wrote Screamplay (then titled Death City) in his West Hollywood apartment. “Slasher Pics” were big then, and we wrote it with an eye toward Ed starring as Edgar Allen and with me directing. While we had some nibbles on the script, we had no takers.
The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapić, 1928)
At the AFI, I also had the rare pleasure of catching elderly film theoretician Slavko Vorkapić’s last lectures on the Gestalt theory of filmmaking. Inspired, I returned to Boston and with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, formed the Boston Black and White Movie Company with fellow students from the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts. We shot, acted in and processed and printed our own black and white reversal 16mm short films ourselves and showed them around town with live musical accompaniment. Many of these films were shot in my 3,200 square foot South End loft, which I converted into a film studio.
After another frustrating visit to Los Angeles, I decided to return to my Boston studio and to raise the money to make Screamplay myself. To raise interest and assemble a cast and crew from my original Boston filmmaking cohorts, I made a 4′ square matte painting of the Welcome Apartments with removable sections, then took a hammer and saw and built the steps and walls to be used in the movie. With these, I was able to demonstrate to my friends how the sets could be swapped around and combined with the matte painting to convincingly convey the impression of a three-story courtyard in Hollywood. With $25,000 raised from friends and family, we prepared to make the movie. Ed Greenberg could not leave LA to participate, so I decided to take the role of Edgar as well as director.
Rufus B Seder as Edgar Allen, on the set of Screamplay (photo by George Kuchar)
Artist Cheryl Hirshman stepped in to complete more matte paintings (and the poster for the movie), and animator Flip Johnson, in addition to playing one of the cops, developed additional special effects such as the undulating water in the apartment complex swimming pool (filmed real time through the matte painting – no actual water used), and Nicky’s motorcycle accident (a filmed scale model motorcycle and truck transformed into dozens of 8″ x 10″ black and white photos onto which Flip ink-stippled splatting blood and then re-animated).
L-R: George Cordeiro, Basil Bova and Ted Braun, on the set of Screamplay (photo by George Kuchar)
To create the other visual effects, we built a front projection system (a la Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 ape sequence) using a large beam splitter and a lot of 3M retro-reflective material. My father, Gus Seder (who also played Al Weiner in the movie), designed an electro-mechanical “phase lock loop” which synchronized a 16mm movie projector to my 16mm Bolex camera, permitting us to project pre-filmed footage behind the actors. We designed and constructed a special tripod for the Bolex which would keep the nodal point of the lens in one exact spot at all times – essential to keeping the live action set from spatially displacing from the cutout portion of the matte painting when we tilted and panned.
Contemporaneous TV feature, behind the scenes of Screamplay
Underground filmmaker George Kuchar and I had become friends by then, and we flew him in for a month to play the part of Martin, the manager of the Welcome Apartments and the villain of the piece. I’ll never forget the first take we did of him: He was to step out of second floor apartment, glower down (presumably at Edgar) and frown. George did all that, and to top it off, he spat over the railing (right onto our brand-new set). That’s when I knew I had chosen right guy for the role!
Shooting went well until filming of the final fight scene in Edgar’s storage room, when disaster struck. George, approaching me from behind to strangle me, slipped on a garden hose (part of the set), fell and broke his ankle in three places. As he did not have insurance, we raised more funds to cover his $20,000 hospital cost, effectively doubling our budget from $25,000 to $45,000. During his hospitalization, we filmed the fight scene using one of our crew members, filmmaker Ted Braun, as a “stunt double” for George. As soon as he was well enough to leave the hospital, George returned to the set and we propped him upright to film reaction shots to intercut. The final edited fight scene flows smoothly and you can’t tell it’s not George if you don’t know.
Bob White as Lot, on the set of Screamplay (photo by George Kuchar)
We first showed Screamplay at the 1985 New York Independent Film Festival (sharing the screen with the Coen Brothers’ first feature film Blood Simple. We immediately got interest from New Line Cinema whose Nightmare on Elm Street had just hit big and who wanted to release our film as a midnight movie but only in its original 16mm. When we insisted they blow it up to 35mm for a proper theatrical release, they dropped it.
We also had interest from Troma (who promised to blow it up to 35mm), but chose instead to “world premiere” Screamplay at a local theater in our hometown of Boston, hoping to get good reviews which might entice “classier” distributors. Our strategy backfired when lead Boston Globe film critic at the time, Michael Blowen, panned it roundly. “It is customary for film reviewers to bend over backwards to support independent filmmakers,” he wrote, “But in this case, that contortion is impossible.”
We had no choice but to accept Troma’s offer. The deal – for US distribution only – was that we would start receiving royalties after Troma recouped its cost of blowing up the film to 35mm. Troma never made that money back.
Original Screamplay poster, by Cheryl Hirshman
Internationally, the film enjoyed more success, especially in Germany. It was a hit at the Berlin Film festival, playing to packed midnight crowds. We sold it Bayerischer Rundfunk (German TV) where it was aired as a Halloween special for many years. And I was invited to show the film and serve on a panel with independent filmmakers Frederick Wiseman and Shirley Clarke at the Melkweg Cinema in Amsterdam.
The brutal Boston reviews and the lackluster performance of the film in the US had taken its toll, however. I took it hard, feeling disgraced in my hometown and deserted by some of the friends who had helped me make the film. I ran away back to Los Angeles, where I convinced producer Bill Benenson to pay me to write a script about Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. After fourteen drafts and ten years, I had fashioned it to be a 35mm, hand-cranked black and white silent movie to be shown with live orchestral accompaniment. Bill Benenson thought I was crazy and insisted it be in color with sound. We almost got the money to make it from American Playhouse (educational TV), but when they saw me and Bill arguing about this issue, they dropped it like a hot potato.
James M Connor as Nicky Blair, Katy Bolger as Holly in Screamplay
Back in Boston, I regrouped, teaching film at the Museum School and working as a movie projectionist for a number of years. At one point I picked up my old 16mm Bolex, loaded it with film and went out to film something – anything – but could not think of anything interesting to film. I was finished as a film-maker.
After some soul-searching and introspection, I decided to focus on stuff that gave me personal satisfaction, which led to my lifetime career as a world-class public artist/inventor specializing in optically animated murals, books and toys. Anyone interested in knowing more about my “life after Screamplay”, they can watch my half hour video on YouTube, entitled “Magic, Art and Scanimation”.
Rufus B Seder
Our brand-new, 4K preservation of Screamplay, made from Rufus’ own 16mm print, premieres at Weird Weekend on Sunday 27/10/24. Tickets available here.
For those who might not know about Národní filmový archiv, how would you describe its purposes and activities?
Národní filmový archiv is a memory institution dedicated to preserving, protecting, and promoting Czech film heritage. Our main activities include collecting and preserving moving image not just on 35mm film but also contemporary digital movie production, home movies on 8/16mm film, video art and we are just starting with preservation on digital games. We also have a large collection of film-related materials like screenplays, photographs, film documentation, correspondence, etc. We often digitise and digitally restore films from our collection to which we provide access to researchers, distributors and the general public, to promote Czech cinema both domestically and internationally. We also operate a public library with a fairly large catalogue of film-related works.
What was your pathway to working at NFA, did you always know you wanted to work in a film-related field or even in film preservation specifically?
I came to film preservation from an IT background through a film school. Since childhood, I’ve been immersed in computers with a particular interest in computer graphics, a feat that later in early adolescence transformed into me taking interest in VJing, a discipline of live video accompaniment of music. Later, I studied Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) with emphasis on preservation of both film and digital. Before that, I’ve worked in IT for almost 10 years as a Linux system administrator and saw large IT projects rise and fall, sometimes rushing myself into the middle of my night shift to a datacenter to revive a failed storage array. That gave me a pretty good understanding of how the storage of digital data works, and after I graduated, I took the opportunity that NFA was looking for a Head of Digital laboratory, a position which allowed me to combine my digital and film preservation expertise.
Posters for The Murder of Mr Devil‘s new restoration
What does your job as Director of Audiovisual Collections entail?
I oversee the management, preservation, and accessibility of our vast film and video collections. This involves coordinating preservation efforts, making decisions on restoration projects, managing our digital archive, and collaborating with other departments to ensure our collections are properly catalogued and accessible to researchers and the public. I also participate in various projects, such as our current project pixelarchiv.cz which sets itself a task to kickstart digital preservation of Czech digital games.
How does the archive decide what films and materials to prioritise for preservation and/or restoration?
Our prioritisation process for film restoration is guided by a multifaceted approach that weighs several key factors. We carefully consider the historical and cultural significance of each film, recognizing its importance in the context of Czech and global cinema. The physical condition of the material is a critical concern, with priority often given to films at risk of deterioration to prevent permanent loss. We also take into account the rarity or uniqueness of the content, focusing on preserving films that offer irreplaceable historical or artistic value. The potential for public interest or academic research plays a role in our decision-making, as does the availability of resources and technical feasibility for each project. Additionally, we keep an eye on upcoming anniversaries, retrospectives, or other events that might spark renewed interest in particular films, allowing us to align our restoration efforts with these opportunities for increased visibility and appreciation.
Jirina Bohdalová in The Murder of Mr Devil (Ester Krumbachová, 1970)
What are the current challenges you/the archive faces in caring for films within the archive?
Národní filmový archiv faces several significant challenges in our preservation efforts. A primary concern is maintaining optimal storage conditions for our diverse materials, especially as we confront the realities of climate change, which can affect temperature and humidity control in our facilities. We also grapple with the delicate balance between preserving our collections and making them accessible to researchers and the public, as increased handling can potentially compromise the integrity of fragile items. Additionally, we must continually adapt to rapidly evolving digital preservation technologies, which requires ongoing training, investment in new equipment, and the development of new workflows to ensure our digital archives remain accessible and secure in the long term.
What type of collaborations do you undertake with other European archives?
We actively engage in collaborative efforts with other European archives through various channels. Our involvement is particularly strong in key organisations, with our CEO Michal Bregant currently serving as President of the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE), and our active participation in various committees of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). We do undertake joint restoration projects, exemplified by our work on Extase, a film with Czech, Austrian, German, and French versions. This challenging restoration required careful selection of source materials, with our team focusing on the Czech version while Filmarchiv Austria handled the Austrian version. A similar collaborative approach is being applied to our ongoing restoration of the 1929 silent film Erotikon. Beyond these specific projects, we regularly exchange expertise and best practices with our European counterparts, participate in international conferences and workshops, and collaborate on exhibitions and screenings. These partnerships not only enhance our capabilities but also contribute to the broader preservation and promotion of European cinema heritage.
What were the reasons for restoring The Murder of Mr Devil / Vrazda ing. Certa, and what were the practical processes to ensure it was presented in its best version?
We chose to restore The Murder of Mr Devil due to its unique place in Czech cinema history and mainly its artistic merits. The restoration process was comprehensive and meticulous, beginning with a careful inspection and repair of the original film elements. We then proceeded with a 6.5K scan of the original camera negative to create a digital foundation for our work. The digital restoration phase addressed various forms of damage and degradation that had occurred over time. Colour grading was a crucial step, ensuring that the restored version matched the original cinematography as closely as possible. Parallel to the image restoration, we undertook sound restoration from an original sound negative to preserve the film’s sound quality. The process culminated in the creation of new 4K preservation masters and digital copies, safeguarding this important work for future generations and enabling its presentation to modern audiences.
The stars of The Murder of Mr Devil also feature in The Cassandra Cat / Až přijde kocour, which has risen to wider cult status since its restoration in 2021 – has the popularity of The Cassandra Cat impacted the types of films NFA looks to restore – can the presence of a cat influence you – or has it opened up audiences to the broader possibilities of Czech cinema?
The success of The Cassandra Cat has certainly highlighted the international appeal of Czech cinema from this era. While we don’t necessarily prioritise films based on the presence of popular actors or even cats, the renewed interest has encouraged us to look at other films from the same period and creative teams. It has also opened up opportunities to introduce international audiences to a broader range of Czech cinema, helping us showcase the depth and diversity of our film heritage.
All archives have passion projects that maybe won’t be top of the list for restoration or are necessarily going to be commercial hits even with the established international cinephiles or fan groups, so what are those titles for you?
While I can’t speak for everyone at the archive, personally, I’m passionate about preserving and restoring some of our lesser-known experimental avant-garde films from the 1920s and 1930s, e.g. by Alexander Hackenschmied and Jiří Lehovec. These works may not have broad commercial appeal, but I believe they represent important artistic movements and provide insight into the infancy of experimentation in Czech cinema. If everything goes as expected, the films will be digitally restored this year. Additionally, I’m keen on restoring some of our postwar documentary films in the future, as this type of cinema has also been overlooked with respect to returning films back to the big screen.
Is there one common misconception about film preservation or archiving that you would like to dispel?
One common misconception is that once a film is digitised and stored in the digital archive, the preservation work is done. In reality, digital preservation comes with its own set of challenges and ongoing responsibilities. Digital files require constant maintenance, migration to open formats, and careful management to ensure long-term accessibility. Additionally, we still need to preserve the original film materials as they often contain information that current digital technology can’t fully capture, and until it can, it appears we are sentenced to redo the restorations every decade or so. Nevertheless, we care for the film materials not just to maintain a source for the digitization process, but mainly to preserve these original cultural objects for posterity, as in preserving the Sumerian clay tablets which also have been already translated, digitised, rewritten, etc. Reformatting media is an infinite process, thus we always need access to the originals, while they last.
Weird Weekend present the UK premiere of Národní filmový archiv’s new restoration of The Murder of Mr Devilon Friday 26th July, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow.Tickets are available here.
Find out more about Národní filmový archiv’s work at their website here. Visit their shop for discs, books and merch here (we particularly recommend their Cassandra Cat tees).
Jiřina Bohdalová as Ona/She, in The Murder of Mr Devil (Ester Krumbachová, 1970)
Function, allure and even murder. From housewives to manic pixie dream girls, the humble tights (or nylons, pantyhose, hoses – your preference, really1) have enjoyed a cinematic representation any star would envy. One such time capsule of the interwoven nature of nylons on film is Ester Krumbachová’s The Murder of Mr Devil(1970). Despite the implied supernatural elements at play otherwise, The Murder of Mr Devil highlights a gorgeous intersection of practical fashion and seductive personal style. Arguably, Ona’s2 (Jirina Bohdalová) consistent commitment to opaque black tights is born from necessity, as the only window in her flat seems to be consistently open (or have no glass at all?). Choosing to sleep in a fetching mint-coloured negligee paired with thick, black tights suggests a determination to preserve her own subtly opulent style despite the cold.
From Sybil Seely’s thick, black undergarments in One Week (Edward F Cline, Buster Keaton, 1920) – an accurate depiction of the era’s necessary, sturdy housewifing attire – to generations of superhero films3, tights continue to tangle with cinema in the spin and drain of culture. Although tights, in various fabrics, forms and fashions, date back to as early as the 16th century, the rising hemlines of the 1920s saw a rise in their popularity – just in time for the new era of modern populist “sound” cinema. Tights, in classic black form, playful patterns and alluring sheer variants, have been captured on film across nations, classes and evolving trends.
The classique black tights, sheer or opaque, as the understated practical foundation or intimately suggestive fashion choice of (predominantly) women’s outfits, is the baseline of tights’ on-screen representation. But to limit their importance to simply practical items would be to omit some of their most interesting uses – and cinematic heritage – as indicators of personal style, identity-obscuring disguises and opportune murder weapons.
Poster for Black Tight Killers (Yasuharu Hasebe, 1966)
Mundanity as style or, perhaps more accurately, style despite mundanity, is exemplified in Ona’s commitment to tights as partners to her vastly varying hemlines, from micro to maxi, throughout The Murder of Mr Devil. Sybil Seely’s mid-calf plaid number paired with black tights in One Week is more plain than Ona’s also predominantly house-bound wardrobe. Tights as an item of allure can transform experiences and actions of mundanity. Ona’s legs in high-slit maxi dresses or full legs out in micro dresses are enhanced, not obfuscated, through the wearing of tights, bringing an intentional sensuality to daily mundane activities. Valérie Kaprisky as Ethel in La Femme Publique (Andrzej Żuławski, 1984) is another gorgeous example. Ethel transforms and traverses French domestic and the urban landscape in draped thigh-split dresses, revealing a suggestive lack of underwear.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, slits, or an explict erotic je ne sais quoi, isn’t necessary to ensure tights wow on screen. In fact, a skirt, or even bottoms, isn’t required at all. Judy Garland, as Jan Falbury, in Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950) delivers one of the most, if not the most, iconic moments for tights in cinema. Wearing a white shirt, black blazer, matching black fedora and only sheer black tights and heels on bottom, Garland belts out Get Happy. The sheer, perfect, tights contrast with the otherwise masculine, structured look without softening it, giving Garland as powerful and impactful a silhouette as the men in full suits alongside her.
Another powerful and impactful on-screen presence of black tights can be seen in the aptly named Black Tight Killers (Yasuharu Hasebe, 1966), with a gang of women utilising the practical nature of tights whilst still being able to cut an imposing shape in their matching leather jackets. A classic black tight, good enough to serve lunch in, good enough to kill in.
Ona’s only departure from classic black tights comes as she sits atop a large bag of raisins, gleeful in her fiendish activities, legs protruding from the thigh-high side splits of her floor-length brown dress. Her tights mirror this unbridled energy, a self-expression of freedom. Cinematic departures from plain tights often embody this type of woman, or girlish, freedom. Although not the first style trend/s to do so, a filmography encapsulating “twee” or, to be era-specific in the terminology, “indie” styles of (often young) women (somewhat leaning into the “manic pixie dream girl” trope) presents impressive and eclectic on-screen tights in varying patterns and colours; the blue tights of Jordana (Yasmin Paige) in Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2011), Eve’s (Emily Browning) black polka dot tights in God Help The Girl (Stuart Murdoch, 2014), Enid’s red tiger-striped tights to match her monochrome red outfit in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001) and, of course, Clementine’s (Kate Winslet) remembered/imagined childhood green tights in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004).
Indie/twee film tights in their natural home, Tumblr.
Tights as fashion items can convey personal identity but they can also be a useful tool in the obfuscation of identity. Tights4 as disguises for illegal activities, predominantly robberies in various forms, take on the purpose of distorting rather than enhancing personal features. Early examples of this visual shorthand for mischief, malice or both, seen in Plunder Road (Hubert Cornfield, 1957) and Strongroom (Vernon Sewell, 1962), have a rather unsettling quality about them. The tights in these instances create an opaque, smooth plane, devoid of recognisable characteristics, the contours of the faces beneath creating shadows which, in the black and white images, present as sinister, almost non-human.
Perhaps more likely to be recalled when thinking of this visual motif is the use of sheer tights, which do lesss to truly hide one’s identity and more to pull at and rearrange, in funhouse-mirror-style, existing features. Walter Grauman’s Lady in a Cage (1964) leans into this unsettling quality. As a gang terrorises a trapped, well-to-do woman, the uncanny nature of their faces distorted through tights lends further unease to their acts and intentions.
James Caan as Randall, in Lady in a Cage (Walter Grauman, 1964)
This can create comical non-concealment of identity, such as Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona (Ethan Coen, 1987), with his character Hi McDunnough’s unmistakable features shining through. Another Cage pic, Wild At Heart (David Lynch, 1987), again leans towards the sinister in its use of nylons, with Cage’s short-lived partner Bobby Peru’s (Willem Dafoe) grotesque features emphasised by the not-nearly-thick enough barrier between him, his victims and us as the audience5. A special mention must also go to Tom Noonan as Francis Dollarhyde in Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1989), whose use of a sheer tight mask from his nose upwards seems to be used solely in aid of enhancing his creepy persona.
From the head of a murderer to their hands, tights can again be transformed, this time into weapons. Fetish content aside (e.g. Silk Stocking Strangler, William Hellfire, 2002), the use of tights as a weapon seems to come from the same place as their most basic use as clothing – practicality, since they are most often in reach as the victim is almost always a woman.Although not always, as highlighted in The Nylon Noose (Rudolf Zehetgruber, 1963), a tail of tights-based murders with far more bizarre, fantastical things happening alongside.
The Nylon Noose (Die Nylonschlinge, Rudolf Zehetgruber, 1963)
The Strangler (Burt Topper, 1964) draws inspiration not from the fantastic but from sadly horrific reality – the series of 13 murders, 1962-64, by a killer nicknamed The Boston Strangler6. Topper manages to reenact, with creative liberties, the real-life details of stockings as murder weapons in a sensualist and somewhat dehumanising manner to the (recently) deceased women, something for which cinema proves adept at unfortunately often. Fatal Pulse (Anthony J Christopher, 1988), a represenative example, draws on this theme of women as disposable items, beginning, in an almost parody of the slasher genre, with a topless blonde-haired woman scrambling from an assailant in her bedroom, only to be undone by her own white lace stockings.
Fatal Pulse (Anthony J Christopher, 1988)
The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975) sees the (implied) death of yet another woman, as the robotic duplicate of protagonist Joanna (Katharine Ross) twists tights taut in her hands, having been discovered. In this context, tights act as a tool of distancing from the violence the men of the town are undertaking upon their wives. Tights as tools of violence seem particularly gruesome, the weaponising of an inconspicuous object so closely tied to women’s daily lives, self-expression and sexual allure.
Katharine Ross as “Joanna”, in The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975)
Tights hold the ability to express the expected duality of womanhood – the dutiful housewife, whose aesthetics and dress are led by practicality and function, and the whore, dressed only to attract. Ona’s wardrobe and style in The Murder of Mr Devil doesn’t necessarily rest on tights, but they are the often overlooked foundation, a necessary element of life, like food or wooden furniture legs, without which everything becomes unstable.
Megan Mitchell
Weird Weekend present The Murder of Mr Devil on Friday 26th July, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Specific styles and variants which fall into the broad ‘tights’ family have been limited or omitted in this article, including stockings and fishnets (as they relate to showgirls, sex workers, fashion subcultures and women’s sexuality) and footless tights/leggings, as they truly deserve their own attention, and even lengthy articles. ↩︎
Ona is simply “She” in Czech; we’ve retained the original language throughout for the purposes of readability. ↩︎
Iconic Adam West’s Batman (Leslie H Martinson, 1966) may be the go-to mental image for this, and arguably – although pretty thick and more legging-like – Christopher Reeve’s Superman (1978-1983). ↩︎
NB this could arguably fall exclusively under “stockings”. However, inclusion is permitted with the understanding that identification of tights vs stockings, post-robbery modification – i.e. if tights have been cut to allow for ease of use – would be difficult. ↩︎
Coincidentally, Frederick Elmes noted his somewhat experimental use of tights stretched across the camera’s lens to create a subtle, dream-like effect for Wild At Heart during a post-screening Q&A at NYC’s Metrograph, April 13th 2024. ↩︎
Other filmic adaptations of this crime include The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968) and Boston Strangler (Matt Ruskin, 2023). ↩︎
When you read Divinity director Eddie Alcazar saying, “There is no script for this film,”1 for most armchair experts, that’s a big, flapping red flag. According to DC Studios CEO James Gunn, shooting with unfinished scripts is “the number one reason for the deteriorating quality of feature films.” Since taking on his new role, Gunn’s vowed not to green light a film until it has a finished script. Hollywood’s endemic lack of respect for screenplays (and their creators) is so notorious, though, that the mission statement is news, rather than the insight. Akira Kurosawa is oft-quoted in the same vein:
“With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.”
Of course, even the best scripts are far from sacrosanct. Film-makers often need to rip them up due to budget or scheduling constraints, unforeseen challenges with locations, or any other random adversities that impinge on production. Planned reshoots are standard stages in a big-budget film’s schedule and “we’ll fix it in post” a well-worn cliché. Even if all of those words make it to the edit suite as intended, whole pages, sequences, storylines can ultimately be stripped out, needs must.
Of his own accord, Barry Keoghan in Saltburn (Emerald F’nell, 2023)
Some of the most famous moments in popular cinema were unscripted or unplanned too, from now-notorious episodes in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984) and Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023) to iconic lines like, “I’m walkin’ here!”, “Here’s Johnny!” and “Here’s looking at you, kid.”2 Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s screenplay for The Blair Witch Project (1999) was only 35 pages along and the dialogue intended to be entirely improvised, an approach which later influenced the production of Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (2010). Christopher Guest’s mockumentary ouevre showcases largely improvised dialogue, from Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap (1984), through his own Waiting For Guffman (1996) to Mascots (2016). And then there’s the improv-heavy, “line-o-rama” approach, proven and popularised by writer/producer/director Judd Apatow, where performers are given free rein in front of the camera to riff on and develop what’s on the page.
Closest to Divinity, in some ways, is Coherence, James Ward Byrkit’s well-received 2o13 sci-fi thriller, carefully planned but filmed without a script and with an improvising cast. Byrkit has explained:
Instead of a script I had my own 12-page treatment that I spent about a year working on. It outlined all of the twists and reveals, and character arcs and pieces of the puzzle that needed to happen scene-by-scene. But each day, instead of getting a script, the actors would get a page of notes for their individual character, whether it was a backstory or information about their motivations… The goal was to get them listening to each other, and engaged in the mystery of it all.3
Poster for Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973), by G. Dedieu
Other film-makers make a virtue of sparse or non-existent scripts, from page to screen. Screenplays are evidently much more than dialogue but, in those terms alone, there are films which are purposefully laconic. JC Chandor’s All Is Lost (2013) contains only 195 words in all its 106 minutes, and only 154 of those words for solo star Robert Redford.4 Luc Besson’s Le Dernier Combat (1983) contains only two. Not to entirely gloss over generations of silent movies (and their later tributes and homages), but there are many modern films that prioritise visual storytelling without aping young cinema. There are a number of films that indulge in sublingual dialogue, like Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973), Steve Oram’s Aaaaaaaah! (2015), Sasquatch Sunset (David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, 2024) or the gibberish stylings of Nude Tuesday (Armağan Ballantyne, 2022). There are more generally meditative works, works of slow cinema and, of course, the haiku-like screenplay for Walter Hill’s The Driver, “the purest I ever wrote”.
Excerpts from Walter Hill’s script for The Driver (1978)
However, the received wisdom is that to start production without a full script (consensus seems to be somewhere around 20-25,000 words, though they tend to be measured in pages, roughly one per-screen-minute) is to court certain disaster. Many notable box office successes with a reportedly slipshod approach to pre-preparedness – e.g. Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008)5, Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)6, Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)7 – contradict that, though. And recently, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie method for developing the Mission: Impossible films has flipped the concept on its head, purposefully devising, developing and even shooting the action set-pieces before a narrative framework has been decided in order to make sense of them.8
For Alcazar, though, shooting without a full script is simply a different mode of film-making, hewing more closely to his voluminous storyboards and informed by the stop-start nature of his production, principle photography stretching to a year, “over the course of seven different shoots.” As he describes:
I shot a bit, edited for two or three months, then shot again, because I wasn’t really confined by a script. I had my storyboards, but I wanted to leave it open for new and fresh ideas.My biggest goal is try to figure out a way to make films that don’t deny any creative ideas. It just sucks when you’re like, “Damn, I should have done this.”9
Actors, inevitably, had to sign on without even the promise of a standard blueprint. Lead actor Stephen Dorff was given just 30-40 pages of a script for Divinity, from which he then observed Alcazar “embellishing the idea”1. For Bella Thorne, in the admittedly much smaller role of Ziva, there was no script at all. Noting Divinity was also shot on film11, Dorff concluded, “[Alcazar] basically took some of the most challenging things and decided to make a movie with all of them. But that is what makes Eddie Eddie, and what makes this film dynamic and exciting.”
We’re used to hearing about how central storyboards and pre-vis are to modern film-making, especially fantastic or genre cinema, so perhaps it’s easy to imagine a tightly-visualised production where the action is locked down and the dialogue either spontaneous or superfluous, depending where we find ourselves on the spectrum of Alcazar’s “fresh ideas”. According to Divinity cinematographer and frequent Alcazar collaborator Danny Hiele, though, that’s not quite the case:
We did have storyboards, but they serve more as a general reference rather than a shot-for-shot blueprint. When the actors are on set and run through a scene, that’s when things really take shape. The storyboard informs us of basic needs like close-ups or wide shots. In essence, it’s like free jazz: we have a team and a general theme, and we improvise within that framework without going off on a tangent.
A key way that Divinity differs from Coherence, say, is that it was funded entirely, albeit modestly, by Steven Soderbergh, with no conditions. The results, inevitably, speak for themselves, but one through line in the praise and criticism of Divinity is the conclusion (or perhaps concession?) that it’s “best understood as a vibe”12, in the broader grand tradition of midnight movies – it needs to be experienced, among people, not read like a book – though perhaps that’s an easy shrug to “style-over-substance” criticism.
One thing we can assume, for better or worse, is that Divinity is exactly the film Alcazar (whose background is in VFX and 3D animation) wanted to make, whether he knew it or not. Curiously, though, for such an evidently auteurish approach, one of Alcazar’s drivers is the desire to cede control. Eschewing a more traditional script was a deliberate step towards that:
In visual effects, you do have full control over everything. You’re literally working in a 3D space where every character is a puppet. You move them frame by frame and you look at every detail. The reason I got into filmmaking was just so I don’t have to do all that stuff. With characters especially, I want to be surprised. I want people to surprise me with their performances, or whatever area they’re in while we create the film.13
So, no-script film-making is not new, nor is it necessarily out-of-fashion, but it’s still rare to intentionally barrel into principal photography with no script and no intention to write one. In this regard, the teachings of Scott Shaw, author, actor, filmmaker, composer, artist, journalist, photographer, blogger, erstwhile martial artist and proponent of Zen Filmmaking14, are instructive. In his own words:
The impetus for the birth of Zen Filmmaking occurred after the first weekend of production on The Roller Blade Seven. [Director Donald G Jackson] and I were very disappointed with the performances of the massive cast we had hired to take part in the film. We looked at each other and realized that the majority of them did not have the talent to truly pull-off the roll of the character they had been assigned. With this, we came to a realization to just go out and film the movie, not expect anything from our cast and crew, and make up the story as we went along. After a few days of this style of production, I had a realization, based in my lifelong involvement with eastern mysticism. I looked at Don and said, “This is Zen. This is Zen Filmmaking.” And, that was it.
Poster for Legend of the Roller Blade Seven (Donald G Jackson, 1992)
The foundation of Zen Filmmaking, and the guiding principle of each of the 161 films Shaw has directed since his first solo Zen Film, Samurai Vampire Bikers From Hell (1992), is…no foundation. More practically, no screenplay, as Shaw explains:
First of all, and perhaps most importantly, from a philosophic perspective, screenplays keep you locked into a stagnate mindset. If your film is created around a screenplay, then your cast and crew are very reluctant to allow things to change. But, if you go into a project with simply an overview of a story idea, then your project becomes free and new inspiration is allowed to occur at any moment. And, believe me, from someone who has made a lot of films, you never know what new inspiration will strike or what great unexpected situation will present itself when you get to your location, have your cast in place, and are open minded about what you will actually film.
The other reason to not use a screenplay is based upon the fact that in your mind’s eye you can write a great story, have it set in elaborate locations, and acted out by great actors. For anyone who has ever been on a low-budget movie set, you quickly see that this is not the case. So, what occurs by writing an elaborate screenplay is that you are only setting yourself up for disappointment. But, with no screenplay, you are free. Any production is allowed to happen as it happens and become what it becomes.
Shaw has developed six tenets of Zen Filmmaking which guide and shape his practice and that you can explore at his website, here. “If you acutely plan your productions, with screenplays, storyboards, and locations,” he argues, “there is no room for the instantaneousness of Cinematic Enlightenment to occur.” He concludes, “In Zen Filmmaking, nothing is desired and, thus, all outcomes are perfect.”
Sean Welsh
Weird Weekend present Divinity on Friday 28th June, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
Eddie Alcazar, as told to Constanza Falco Raez, flaunt.com↩︎
Casablanca famously commenced shooting with only half a script; the equally famous “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” was dubbed by Bogart a month after filming concluded. ↩︎
James Ward Byrkit, “How Gotham Nominee James Ward Byrkit Made ‘Coherence’ in 5 Days with No Script or Budget”, Indiewire↩︎
Ref star Jeff Bridges, “They had no script, man. They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn’t know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, ‘You got any ideas?'” (as reported by Gizmodo) ↩︎
Ref screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, “It was not at all locked in. We had enough to start shooting the first ten days. I was writing frantically ahead of schedule… If I wasn’t on call as an actor that day I was holed up in the cabin writing the rest of the movie.” (Money Into Light) ↩︎
Ref star Russell Crowe, “It had 21 pages when we started shooting…it’s the dumbest possible way to make a film.” (BBC Radio 1) ↩︎
Ref Writer/Director Christopher McQuarrie, “There’s that little GIF of Wallace And Gromit, and Gromit is putting the track in front of the train. That’s very much what making Mission: Impossible is.” (Empire Magazine) ↩︎
It’s about life, death, and rebirth – those are the main themes that surround it. It’s about a character named Jaxxon (Stephen Dorff), who ends up creating a chemical called Divinity. It enables people to become pretty much immortal, at least physically immortal. But it’s a work-in- progress, the mind aspect hasn’t been fully figured out, so minds are deteriorating the same as normal, but everyone is physically in their prime. Another side-effect is that you can’t reproduce when you’re taking the chemical, so people taking it must choose… either to live forever or give life.
Can you talk about the themes within the film?
I guess everybody has their own interpretation of the afterlife, what life and rebirth is. Mainly, I use these themes for people to think and ask questions about them, and kind of just dive into them deeper; not necessarily answering how it should be. It was mainly to pose these questions.
Can you talk about the sibling brother relationships in the film?
Between Moises and Jason – They’re star children, these brothers that were made from stardust, and they have one sole purpose. I don’t know if this is revealing too much, but pretty much they were created to maintain balance in the universe. They are sent to this planet where they sense something that is causing a disturbance, which is Divinity. They’re there to save the planet so it doesn’t self-destruct.
How did this amazing cast come together? Have you worked with any of the talent previously?
I like working with new talent to see where their instincts lie. We had a basic treatment and then we used storyboards. So, I put all these on a wall and then I brought these actors in that I admired, and that I thought fit well with the project, and then I kind of went through the whole entire film with them on the wall. So, they pretty much got a firsthand look at the film, not necessarily what you interpret from words but literal drawings of how the shot is angled and everything, from these storyboards. That created a conversation, and they were either down for it or not, but pretty much everyone that I wanted I was able to get for it, and they were excited to try something different.
Karrueche Tran as Nikita in Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)
What was the biggest challenge making the film?
Resources are always tricky. And I think, when you’re creating something like this film, which I feel hasn’t been done, we’re all kind of coming together to explore a new way of creating films, but also how we tell them. I think we were ready for it and we knew it was going to be challenging. It’s tough obviously when you don’t have a lot of money or resources to make things easier with time or added manpower. All we had was kind of persistence with people that were able to still see the end to the finish line and do whatever possible to get it there.
Was there a particular scene that stands out in your mind when you were shooting the film?
Not anything in particular. I mean, everything was just kind of equally nuts, but I think overall the creature transformation that Dorff goes through was pretty unique and different, and challenging at the same time.
Stephen Dorff as Jaxxon in Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)
Can you talk about the decision to shoot the film in black and white?
The last couple films I did, at least in short form, were also in the same aesthetic and I wanted to explore it in the longer form – wanted to see if it would hold up. I wanted to utilise all the stuff I learned with my shorts into something bigger. I’ve only heard of a couple of films that have ever been shot on our specific format – the black and white reversal, it’s kind of a unique stock that Kodak had to make specifically for us.
How did Steven Soderbergh become involved with the film? Was there any great advice he gave you during the production?
He was executive producer on my last film Perfect and from there our relationship grew and one day we were talking, and he just offered to fund my next idea. It was really just as simple as that. He didn’t really ask what it was about or anything specific, it’s just this amount of money and I can do just whatever with it, which was pretty amazing but also that’s a lot of pressure on your shoulders, to make sure it gets the money back and it makes him happy creatively. I always text him here and there about specific little things but as far as creativity I think he wants me to find it on my own, he doesn’t really influence any of that.
How did DJ Muggs get involved with the project?
So, there are two composers, DJ Muggs and Dean Hurley. Dean had worked with him on one of his albums before and he put me in touch with him, and we met. This is the first time DJ Muggs is really scoring a film, so he was really excited. I showed him some of the footage and it just seemed like it was just a perfect fit for him to explore some of these ideas and work with Dean again. I’ve been a big fan of his since I was a kid.
Thanks to Utopia
Weird Weekend present Divinity on Friday 28th June, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
This is the advertising maxim that arms Divinity throughout and is the plate on which it’s served: Modern Life Has Become Fatalistically Obsessed With Itself.
Set deep in the glistening, eerie hills of an unnamed American desert, Divinity is a film that feels so new and oblique, it feels weird to contemplate. Focusing on the story of two celestial brothers that arrive on Earth to kidnap and punish Jaxxon (a jittering, pissed off Stephen Dorff), the creator and researcher of Divinity: A product that enhances life to the point of immortality. To add to the rotating ethical quandries floating around his great research mansion – a neo-brutalist cave shaped like an isopod – is call girl Nikita with a perhaps seraphic fertility and Jaxxon’s turbo-shredded brother Rip, the face of the product.
Already, as I’m describing this to you, it feels like I’m straightening it too much. Rigidity doesn’t exist here.
Divinity’s world is one, twice removed and three steps in front of our future, but it feels there to goad us into copying its shape. An experimental mood-piece world where every advert is entirely sexualizing things like cereal, or selling you sex wholesale. A pulsing, horny, body-obsessed grotesquerie that wants you to have sex in front of the TV before you purchase. Chemical betterment to to a completely othered mass audience. A world where heavenly stars become inquisitors of Man, and reproduction is caged in a near-new-age etherea cult whose harem exist as apparitions in the opaque. Perfect beings that live in a chrysalis of purity. Of course, the story is told in the desert, the great Mecca for drug adventurism and cult retreat. Cities are so jejune when the glittering stars above aren’t able to locate the darknesses in Man’s heart as it commodifies aging (or lack thereof). Divinity the product is treated as a ubiquitous brand name, both accessible but luxurious. Free samples if you buy Laundry Detergent, and concentrated small-batch fineries for the wealthy. A decadence for every home, but a decadence nonetheless. To see characters defy the tides of time with the elixir, after we see a biblically-accurate angel in static in the opening minute, feels like we truly misunderstand aging. We are the crumbling visage of the universe and our beauty is returning to it.
Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)
The film exercises a dark looseness. It shakes its legs, stretches, curls an iron but it never feels that it has to deliver itself as a solid piece. There are small segments of lust philosophy, in which Nikita explains sex and desire to the brothers, set to a shimmering soundtrack. A great, utterly indulgent aural segment that lets us breathe in the dust rather than ingest it. There are biblical allusions to the brothers, especially in terms of their father’s work, how he passed and its effect on them. We’re given heady notes on medical research that considers human life and its origins as fertile grounds for moral manipulation, if you can bend your light around the FDA and highground naysayers. The sludging masses, reflective of Opioid crisis, Social Media influencers, the ’80s-body-obsessed-carryover and chemical abduction of the soul take hold on your attention throughout. A close cousin to Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond The Black Rainbow, but less evasive in its abstractions. Even in amongst this, there are stopmotion fights, depictions of heaven, souls escaping the body, muscle-bound butlers in shock collars and small sections featuring Scott Bakula. It’s all messy and curious but it never feels like we’re being lectured. It’s a fluid, experimental sci-fi body-horror that focuses on sharpening its body as a blade, not particularly its mind.
Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)
Speaking of which, Divinity is truly one of the great looking and sounding modern sci-fis. I can’t remember anything more stark and evocative in an age. High-grain monochrome Eraserhead-like 16mm film stock that’s been pushed with cheap developer. Something closer to a perfume advert for nightmares over anything else. Whirring, chittering primitive technology, robust in its texturing with a CRT TV tube softness and heavy keyboard shunking. Lots of oscilloscope scanlines raking across the screen. A true, monolithic colour grading that makes the stars look like glittering acne in the night sky and creates grey-blushed dusks. Such brutal textures making everything formulate forthwith from shadows like it’s unsticking itself from glue. The desert transforms at times into a dreamy coal beach, the score itself resting on the extremities of waveforms. Sometimes it sounds like shimmering alien-fires that lift you from within, and at times it turns into frightening industrial technique, overpowering your engine and threatening to turn you into metal. Dean Hurley, frequent David Lynch collaborator, and DJ Muggs, Cypress Hill producer (yes, that Cypress Hill), have such a sense of textural idealism, their work feels like it deepens shadows and licks whatever gritty highlights are available to it. An eerie, mystical soundscape that crushes philosophy and power into diamonds. To truly sand off the edges, there is also a closing credits song by a legendary sci-fi rapper that I won’t reveal, but please stay for.
FUCKKKYOUUU is age-restricted, so we can’t embed it here – watch on YouTube!
It would make sense that director Eddie Alcazar would collaborate with someone like Flying Lotus for a short film entitled FuckkkYouuu, which showcases his proclivities for shadowy strangeness, body contusion and frightening soundscapes, but what really puts my ears back is seeing Steven Soderbergh, Hollywood’s busiest man (I’m personally convinced there are three of him), nestled in the credits as Executive Producer. He has worked previously with Alcazar on his first film, Perfect (2018), but in Divinity I see things that Soderbergh would feel need championed, reflecting his own themes that dominate the politics of his films. Industrial capitalism, commodification of the soul, the deformity of gain and how people become products if we let ourselves be glamoured by vapid idealism. He’s always championed independent film, and with Alcazar it feels like he’s found his weird little guy to use as a reflector of himself: a proud visualist and always finding form to put light on a theme before it scuttles away like a cockroach.
In all the film’s notably and, according to Alcazar, fluid and improvised dialogue, there is one line that lacquers the film more than any. Nikita saying to the Stars:
“Live forever or give life. Pleasure over love”.
Please consider your future before it considers yours for you.
The Reptile House
Weird Weekend present Divinity on Friday 28th June, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
The Reptile House is the alias of Findlay, which is the nickname of the author himself. A banner under which all collective writing, art, submissions and soon-to-be-screenings is nestled. Reflected in the dark terraces of The Reptile House is cinematic pain and oscillations coming from old Adidas brochures. Always open to collaboration. @antibloom (Follow Findlay on Letterboxd)
