From Flesh Gordon to The Sperminator, spoofs of mainstream cultural offerings have long been a staple of the porn industry. Shakespeare porn in particular is surprisingly common, as I found in 2001 when writing an article for Lingua Franca, “The Pound of Flesh.” But here’s something I hadn’t actually seen before: Kubrick porn. In The Sexxxing, a 2005 quickie from Danni.com, a young woman named Miss Torrent applies to be the winter manager of a porn company’s offices—and the place turns out to be haunted by horny, fake-breasted lesbians. Orgasms ensue.

The two clips in the video below are pretty tame, because I edited them that way. But be careful if you’re at work, because there’s a bare breast or two and a few seconds of moaning. The opening titles, in Futura Extra Bold, Kubrick’s favorite typeface, are mine. As is often the case with porn spoofs, this one is an adaptation only in the loosest sense (double entendre alert!), and it was probably filmed in a single afternoon.

There have been several other porn films inspired by Kubrick’s oeuvre, including Spermacus, 2002: A Sex Odyssey, Thighs Wide Shut, and A Clockwork Orgy. I found copies of the last two, but I won’t be posting clips, as they appear to be pretty hardcore all the way through. You’re in luck, though, because I just found the work-safe trailer for A Clockwork Orgy on YouTube. This was made in 1995:

The website Adult DVD Empire has a page for The Sexxxing that isn’t quite safe for work.

And this fake Shining trailer from 2005 is still the funniest thing ever.

There’s no current hook for this post about a little-known Hollywood scandal. It’s just something I’ve been meaning to post about for a couple of years. The bare details have been mentioned online, but only in passing, and as far as I know the scandal has never been officially reported anywhere.

So here it is: Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese’s excellent 1985 film After Hours—a significant portion of the movie’s first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from “Lies,” a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who’s gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It’s possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film’s release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I’ve found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.”

The Wikipedia page for the screenwriter of After Hours, Joseph Minion, mentions that the film included some “minor details” borrowed from Joe Frank, and that Frank successfully sued over it. But the theft was far from minor. Many of the details in the film’s first half hour are similar, if not copied outright: the chance meeting of a man and a kooky but sexy woman; the woman’s offer to set the man up with some of her artist roommate’s plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights; the man’s late-night phone call to the woman; his cab ride to meet her, at the end of which his only cash flies out the window; her wearing of a loosely tied bathrobe when she answers the door; her tale of having been raped by man who came down the fire escape; and so forth.

Here’s the entire monologue so you can judge for yourself. It’s 11 minutes long. If you’ve seen the film, much of this will sound very familiar indeed:

(If you don’t see the Flash audio player, here’s a direct link to the audio file.)

Joseph Minion apparently created the script in his mid-twenties as part of his work at Columbia’s Graduate Film Program. It was later optioned by Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, who showed it to Scorsese. Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise.

There’s also a weird twist: The cabbie who drives Griffin Dunne downtown is played by an actor named Larry Block, and he’s apparently the same Larry Block who appeared on many of Joe Frank’s shows for KCRW in the 1990s. Was the plagiarism discovered during the making of the film, and the role given to Frank’s friend Block as part of the lawsuit negotiations? Whatever the reason, it’s hard to believe Block’s casting was just a coincidence.

If you have any insight into any of this, post away in the comments…

From Vanity Fair’s website, an amazing slide show of lobby cards—”the gorgeous promotional posters that were a common sight in movie theaters from the early 20th century through the 1960s.” They’re from the collection of the late screenwriter Leonard Schrader, the brother of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader.

The slide show itself is here; Peter Biskind’s introductory essay is here.

To read more about this incredible trove of Hollywood ephemera, visit the collection’s official site.

In my ongoing quest to find great, unusual stuff to hang on my walls, I’ve discovered a few amazing poster artists I’d never known about. One is the Polish artist Jan Lenica. But first and foremost is the Cuban illustrator Eduardo Muñoz Bachs (1937-2001), who created more than two thousand posters, most of them for movies. He did much or most of his work for ICAIC, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematografica, founded by the Castro government in 1960 to make and promote Cuban films. I found some of Bachs’s work online and I thought, I have to get some of these. Bachs used vibrant colors in a very Cuban way, and he had an incredible sense of space and proportion.

I now own four Bachs posters, including the first two below (I couldn’t find graphics of the other two I bought):

I found them here in New York at the Cuban Art Space at the Center for Cuban Studies, which is located at 124 West 23rd Street. They have a few dozen silkscreened Bachs posters for sale, as well as a bunch by other talented Cuban artists. Original posters are generally $100, high-quality reproductions (also silkscreened) are $55. I bought four reproductions, and had to stop myself from buying more. They’re a slightly odd size—20” X 30”—but after looking around for a while I found great frames in that exact size at Sam Flax, which is the go-to place in Manhattan for high-quality prefab frames.

Here is a 1995 interview with Bachs. To see more of his posters, and maybe buy one or two, try eBay, Stony Hill Antiques and Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin (linked page contains work by Bachs and other Cuban poster artists), and Soy Cubano, based in Cuba.

On the set of the 1970 film Maidstone, Rip Torn assaults Norman Mailer with a hammer, and Mailer retaliates by biting off a piece of Torn’s ear:

Some backstory:

Norman Mailer created a film in the late 60s called MAIDSTONE. He played the part of a famous movie director who is considering a run for the presidency. Rip Torn played his potential assassin. At the end of filming, Rip appeared to get a little too far into his role, and he attacked Mailer on camera with a hammer, drawing blood. Mailer retaliated by viciously biting into Torn’s ear, drawing even more blood. This is the fight.

It’s debatable how “surprised” that Mailer was by the attack, but it should be noted that he still had the camera crew hanging around and filming, the day after production had allegedly “ended” on the picture. However, the blood from both men is undeniably real, as are the horrified reactions of Mailer’s children (his wife, on the other hand, seems to be overacting badly).

More backstory here.

[via iFilm.]

Quel scandale! In response to my item last week about Claude Lelouch’s classic short film C’etait un rendezvous, my friend Peter Dizikes has provided the following smackdown of the widely reported claim that the car sustained a speed of 140 miles per hour for some or most of the film:

I decided to do a little research for you on the Claude Lelouch film, along with a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

As you mentioned, it is said the driver of the car, whoever it was, hit speeds of up to 140 mph driving through Paris. Sounds pretty fast, right? I decided to test this claim.

The distance from the point where you turn onto the Avenue Foch from the Bois de Boulogne, to the point where the Champs Elysees feeds into the Place de la Concorde, is right about 2.25 miles. Yes, I’m including the curve around the Arc de Triomphe. By my count, the car covers this distance in 1:50 in the film, from the 0:44 mark to the 2:34 mark.

That averages out to about 74 miles per hour. So the car was going fast, but it’s just about impossible it could have been going 140 at any point. Moreover, this is the part of the route most conducive to driving at high speeds, so the car could not have been going faster later in the film, which is also obvious from watching it. A more likely high speed would thus be in the 80s — almost as fast as Princess Di’s driver supposedly was going when they crashed in the underpass at the Place d’ Alma in 1997, of course.

Aren’t you glad I took the time to figure this out?

Others have apparently come to a similar conclusion. I just noticed that the C’etait un rendezvous page on Wikipedia contains the following passage:

Calculations made by several independent groups showed that the car never exceeded 140 km/h (85 mph), Lelouch himself cited that the top speed achieved was 200 km/h.

Comments from Lelouch prove that the vehicle that carried the camera was his 6.9L Mercedes-Benz, with automatic transmission and a top speed of 230 km/h. The gear changes up into 5th and high-revving engine sounds indicate speeds of well over 200 km/h, yet the picture often does not match, as visual speed does not change as much as the sound does. This is due to the fact that the sound track was dubbed with the sound from a Ferrari 275GTB to give the impression of much higher speeds, as confirmed by Lelouch.

I’m not sure if this passage is accurate; at the very least, “comments from Lelouch” do not “prove” anything. But the Wikipedia page does include a link to this photo of Lelouch playing with a camera attached to the front of a Mercedes:

Early on a summer morning in 1978, the French filmmaker Claude Lelouch attached a gyro-stabilized camera to the front of a Ferrari 275GTB. He turned on the camera and handed the car keys to a professional racecar driver, who fired up the engine and then sped through the center of Paris at about 140 miles per hour. The resulting eight-minute film, C’etait un rendezvous, is a classic. Thanks to Google Video and YouTube, it’s gotten a lot of web attention in recent months. But here’s something new: A blogger named Brian Hendrix has created a Google Maps mashup that displays the car’s location on a map as the driver rockets himself through Paris:

Lelouch has apparently claimed that it was he who was behind the wheel; he supposedly also said that the car was a Mercedes, not a Ferrari, and that the sounds of a Ferrari were overdubbed later. But I don’t have the energy to investigate whether (a) he actually claimed these things or (b) the claims are actually true.

[via someone on Echo.]

UPDATE: I posted a follow-up to this item a few days later.

In 1951, a sound designer on a Gary Cooper western called Distant Drums needed to overdub a scream onto a scene in which a man is killed by an alligator. He brought a contract actor into his studio and rolled tape as the man did six brief, anguished screams in one take. These screams were then added to the Warner Brothers sound library, and over the next couple of decades they found their way into dozens of Warner Brothers films.

In the mid-’70s, a young sound designer named Ben Burtt gave these sounds a name: “the Wilhelm scream,” after a character in one of the earliest films that utilized the sounds. A couple of years later, Burtt was hired to work on a film called Star Wars. As an homage, he overdubbed the scream onto a scene in that film. Then he overdubbed it onto a scene in The Empire Strikes Back. And Return of the Jedi. A fellow Lucasfilm sound designer began using the Wilhelm too, in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, among other movies. And thus a film-geek in-joke was born. In the last 30 years the Wilhelm has been used winkingly in dozens of movies and TV shows, from Reservoir Dogs and The X-Files to Aladdin and Return of the King. More details are at Hollywood Lost and Found.

The video below is a compilation of dozens of Wilhelms from the last half-century.

[via an excellent blog called Cynical-C.]

Here’s a YouTube gem: the rarely seen 2002 short film Ernest and Bertram, which tells the sad and ultimately violent tale of the doomed relationship between those two closeted Muppets. Lawyers at Sesame Workshop forced the eight-minute film out of circulation right after its well-received showing at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. The minor-key rendition of the Sesame Street theme song is hilarious.

[via one of the smart people on Echo.]

La Jetée, the experimental New Wave short by the French director Chris Marker, is probably best known today for having served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. But Marker’s 26-minute masterpiece is by far the more important and original work, and not just because 12 Monkeys was almost ruined by Brad Pitt’s awful—but Oscar-nominated!—performance as a deranged animal-rights activist.

Except for one brief clip of a blinking eye, La Jetée (1962) is comprised entirely of black-and-white still images, voiceover narration, and unobtrusive minor-key music. The action, such as it is, takes place in the aftermath of World War III. Paris has been destroyed, along with much of the rest of the civilized world, and all survivors were long ago forced underground. A group of scientists is attempting to find food and energy by subjecting prisoners to rudimentary time-travel experiments. The film’s time-traveling protagonist, identified simply as “the man whose story we are telling,” is haunted by a childhood memory of an incident he witnessed on a pier (a jetée) at Orly Airport. He is sent again and again to prewar Paris, where he spends time with a beautiful young woman whose significance to him he can’t quite grasp.

La Jetée is about time, memory, and longing, among other things, and it’s incredibly complex and powerful. This seven-and-a-half-minute clip is from the first half of the film. (I taped it off of the Sundance Channel a few months ago.) The voiceover has been rerecorded in (French-accented) English.

The film seems to be hard to find on DVD, but Amazon can hook you up with used copies of a DVD compilation that includes it. And ooh, I just discovered that someone has uploaded the entire original French version to Google Video.