‘Oh Randy-Randi…’ My Lord’s peeps ’n’ emails would invariably begin.
Lord B-C: Oh Randy-Randi, I thought Dickens just made that name (Chuzzlewit) up.
RC: My Lord, I thought Dickens made you up.
Lord B-C: Too witty, Randy-Randi, just too witty…!
RC: One more thing, Lord B-C.
Lord B-C: Yes, Randy-Randi?
RC: I made Dickens up, you know!
Lord B-C: Oh, Randy-Randi!!
Etc., etc.
[A six-volume set, ‘The Collected Peeps, Dreeps, Creepings and Emails (So-Far) Between Lord Lakey Veinsteim Blubber-Chancre, Peer of the Realm, and Randi Molvin Chuzzlewit, Average American Commoner’, was published last year by Pollymush – Varna’s prestige publishing division – to huge critical acclaim.]
(Randi mockingly referred to his patron as Lord Fatty-Venereal in private, which was not too off the mark, as Lord B-C was morbidly obese – and syphilitic, too!)
Truth to tell, sooner or later, everybody in the Industry came into contact with the reviews of Randi Chuzzlewit. His was a new kind of outspokenness that catered to the very soul of the nasty. No wit or purified dedication to credible literary interpretation of any kind ever had leash on his fecund keyboard. Randi’s reviews went straight for the brainstem, where they gnawed and chipped at all aspects of production, and pressurized the very fiber out of what attempted to be a photoplay. That was just his nature as a critic. The only thing he was sincere about was demolition.
But what good did it do? What was he contributing? Many thought his not-so-carefully-chosen-but-hard-to-argue-with words were more an exercise in power politics than a worthy tablet of observing cinematic output throughout the calendar. But who could argue with a monolith? It was part of the Hollywood of today: a certain degree of success might be achieved, but only through unholy pacts with unname-ably offensive power sources could it be sustained.
In other words, Randi had a patron who was more mean-spirited than he was.
Randi thought ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (Mutual, 1915) was a fake. In the wider sense, he had always claimed that racism was a hoax.
‘Gone With The Wind’ (Selznick, 1939): ‘Rubbish, unsuitable for even a sub-human particle’s consumption.’
‘Hallelujah, I’m a Bum’ (UA, 1933): ‘Songs a snob would sing, and musical direction that’s totally unrealistic.’
‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ (MGM, 1955): ‘Snot – and not from my nose.’
‘The Godfather’ (Paramount, 1972): ‘A cheat! I’ve been CHEATED!!!!!!’
‘The Chips Kimball Story’ (Ziggurat): ‘Stale gravy, of a metallic-brown hue, which has been steadily gathering under my truantly-uncleansed fingernails for some time now. Do you wish to know why the cleansing is truant? Rage! Rage at my reaction to this picture! I have been clawing raw earth and heaping it upon my fevered brow for days at a stretch now. Dirt and its effects are my fate for the foreseeable future. Knowledge and memory of this insidious picture have kept me in a cage for these twenty-one days now. Yet do I seek resolve! But lo, I see only one escape from my dilemma: seek, ban, then burn each and every print, work print, and carefully-preserved outtakes of, for, and concerning this, this so-called ‘Chips Kimball Story’! I say this now! Destroy them, with fire and with sword! Then and only then can my fingernails be restored to a state of clean grace. No one on this planet deserves to undergo such an ordeal, due to such a misguided picture!’
That kind of thing.
And one of the great classics, ‘Look! A Piece of Hebrew Cloth!’ (Columbia, 1999) was to him the consummation of failure. Unimaginable, but influential.
In a rare acquiescence of waxing fond for a picture, ‘Zombie’ aka ‘I Eat Your Skin’ (Cinemation, 1964), RC thrillingly wrote: ‘[it] reminds me of a stale bowl of grayish-brown soup, with coalescing mushroom bits, reminiscent of dried nasal mucus spread upon the wall above a child’s wetted bed, but here, peeking at me from just above the onetime-cooked but now moribund surface, all located in a cracked inner-city eatery bowl, on wan Formica amidst a puddle of the selfsame slop, with built-up grease on the edges of the corroded border-strapping of the counter, which, if licked, would yield a flavor not unlike a handful of fingerprinted pennies. This potage’s taste, settling into my periodontal-blasted gums like dirty flood-slime, causes my swallow-reflex to teeter on the edge of bleak nausea – imminent! Yet! I loved this flick! The performance of the fisherman who gets his head sliced off, is particularly fine, as is his costume, his easygoing Antillean ways, and the authenticity of his mustache.’
It was overbearingly true: Randi loved to gross out his readers. Anything stale, rotted, or putrid usually rated as a starting point. And at the finishing line? Destruction, failure, repulsion. Every time, and in totality. It was his way of getting back at an Industry that hated him with all its might. Hatred returned to sender, with exponential boosters. Broadcast media grudgingly dealt with him, but almost exclusively on a remote basis. Freelance crews would set up camera and sound at a neutral location (usually the lobby of Randi’s Deco high-rise on Sunset, which shall not be named here), and he would lisp through his ramblings, concerning films of the day.
Maddeningly, he remained fully influential and, thus, powerful. His power was the most excruciating raspberry seed the collective wisdom tooth of the Hollywood community had ever felt.
He loved to insult all the biggies, especially Howard Hawks. Why, nobody knew.
‘Howard should feel honored!’ crowed Raoul Walsh. ‘How come Randi never picks on me? Probably because he knows of my extensive high-powered rifle collection. I may have only one eye, but it’s always dead on target. I wouldn’t mess with HH either, if I were him. It’s only a matter of time before…’
After the much-anticipated release of HH’s epic, ‘Simmons Mundbone’ (Mega|Goth), Randi wrote: ‘Imagine, then, that the binding ties from, say, a cohesive, safety-net picture such as this one, from Coward Hawkings, were to stretch out its framework to that latest Geo. Clooney epic and lash it fast to the cyberstructure. Those straight bars protrude out in a direct and supporting manner, and there isn’t a player amongst them that feels put upon or pushed around enough to protest. Thereupon, we all know what to do: if this truth be in our way, we simply get down off our own high horse, and acknowledge the interior ingredient, the soul of the piece. For it either infiltrates us with force, or we yield to its presence, not without some form of admiration! But I? I am compelled to get my troubled mouth working in its most purposeful occupation: forming a garish gob to sputooey upon all that others hold most high. There. I did it. Now, what do you think?’
And he could not abide by Maria Bello, Jennifer Lopez, and mostly, Maria Sansone, if one could believe it.
‘They are the embodiment of everything I find contemptible in motion picture entertainment.’
Then he would go on and on, deconstructing their very beings with venomous analyses. But, but WHY? Those pretty things never hurt nobody.
Just short of slander, avoiding any sort of legal risk, relying on the basest purposes of the First Amendment, and the brutalist forces of the fat, venereal dark Lord in London, Randi’s tactics were designed to get attention, and also, to grasp and hold power at all cost. Power over the people who’d hurt him. His was the stuff that delighted his bloated and sexually impotent CEO.
Undoubtedly, The Walking Bow Tie couldn’t get it up either, so there was nothing else to do but hate and attack those who could.
Similarly, the reviews were in on Randi himself.
‘Randi Chuzzlewit is beneath my even starting to think about trying to contemplate the process of his murder’ was a quote from the mogul Hyman Goth, which somehow made it to ‘Partytime’ magazine (a Varna publication), quoted in full.
Moguls are not above visitations of dyspepsia, and Goth was served his share of encounters, as a result of Randi’s campaign to rid the earth of anything and anyone with whom he found offense.
And there were many in th
e Industry who fought for the honor of having those words (concerning ‘murder’ in this application) attributed to them instead of the usually conservative Hy Goth.
‘He is the personification of puke’ was another bon mot kit, openly uttered by Bob Evans.
The biggies, as well as all the little people, did not even bother with scatological epithets, because ‘The Walking Bow Tie’ was deemed the deepest that insults could go in this known universe. Everyone in Hollywood – and Raintree County, for that matter – had nothing but contempt for he who made his call on their films, with the intent not just to hurt, but to kill.
Randi was a pest, all right. A toxic one. He was troublesome, and he didn’t do a damn thing to promote or sell a film. He had buckteeth, and his mustache was a bizarre dustpan brush sort of thing that nobody ever wanted to get near. He often wore an old wide-brimmed priest hat that he had found in a rain-speckled jumble sale in moldy old Namur, Belgium. It was one of his very few forays abroad, just to get some chocolate (most of which he vomited up later). Xenophobic he was born, and xenophobic he would –
His eyes, burnished by so much reflective light from the hundreds of thousands of motion picture screens he spent his God-given time on this planet in front of, had become particularly steely. In fact, they looked almost exactly like Ray Milland’s at the tail end of the high-quality Psychotronic™ classic, ‘X – The Man With The X-Ray Eyes’ (AIP, 1963). (Randi detested the picture.) At such a point, they were nothing if not ball bearings, solid metal that nevertheless still processed sight. Just the thought of them would make Iron Eyes Cody tremble in his moccasins.
The movie critic’s body, rancid from the base oozings upon which it was – based, was so diminutive that the bow ties often dominated, so that the generally bizarre nature of his personality and appearance was complete.
Psychoanalysts correctly observed that Randi Chuzzlewit was probably filled with so much self-loathing that he was compelled to spread his hatred far and wide, and the vehicle of cinema observation via the mass media had very large all-wheel-drive tires indeed. Persons who were subject to his vitriol correctly deduced that his private parts were atrophied, and had probably never really developed at all.
The man, if that was what he could be labeled, was, in the words of Khushwant Singh, ‘An enigma wrapped within a watery, scummy faience of greasy chiffon, reeking of day-old spittoon overflow. You must believe me when I say, he is beyond ickiness. More rot than living tissue.’
This, after Randi rubbished the Khushwant-penned wide-screen picture, ‘The Guru of Paonta Sahib’ (Sippy, 2001).
In fact, everything about Randi was distasteful.
‘He even ripped off his last name from a literary article by Potchka Krurr!’ ranted Peter Marshall.
So, that was Randi Chuzzlewit.
Related were the upheld emotions endemic among motion picture creators in their working habitat. Particularly writers, trying to provide screenplays that might avoid the terrorism of The Walking Bow Tie’s promenades along the battlements of their territory.
The Dialogues of the Rat Cages:
‘BFD!’
‘What’s the Big Deal?’
‘That Randi Chuzzlewit.’
‘No Jeffrey, he’s a very small deal.’
‘He is power. Real power. Bigger than Golden Rome. I do not say this unhappy fact lightly.’
‘I’m going to write a picture about him!’
‘I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.’
‘In it I shall tear him open. From third eye to anus. If those things actually exist on his hideous, molectifying person – which I hope they don’t!’
‘You cannot do that. Front Office will nix it, pronto.’
‘You just wait, Bub!’
One day later…
‘Well, were you green-lighted?’
‘You were right, my friend. K’boshed.’
‘I tell you, you just can’t touch that Randi Chuzzlewit.’
‘Just, just, WHIE??’
‘Writer, we must understand power and its abuse in order to fully account for this sick-maker Randi’s claw-hold on our Industry.’
‘True! All is corruption. Randi is corrupt. His paper is corrupt. His owner is corrupt. But! I will still write my drama – for the drawer!’
‘Even then, at your peril, my friend, at your peril.’
‘A very small deal! Well, I guess that wasn’t very funny.’
Yes, everyone in Hollywood had to admit, Randi Chuzzlewit was a very Big Deal indeed. And not a very funny one, either.
Not since Tail Gunner Joe and Roy Cohn had the Industry had to put up with such pestilence.
A slump. Hollywood slumped in its chair, ashamed.
It was one of the saddest realizations in town that Randi Chuzzlewit not only existed, but that his grip on everything they in the Industry did was nothing short of the power of a Generalissimus – Yosef Stalin, that is.
It was a fact of life that Randi would review any and every picture of consequence that was released from the picture plants of Industrial Hollywood.
And it came to pass that, on a peculiarly sullen and nondescript morning, The Walking Bow Tie placed his fleshless buttocks onto a seat in the Chegley Stores Multiplication Ultra-Plexx Superamerican Mall Motion Picture Entertainment Rooms just off Extravaganza Blvd.
[This audacious new thoroughfare barged its way as a connector, from the Avenue of the Stars-cum-Pico, across the wastes, to Beverly General All Purpose Way, in time to experience the Warner Bros. shield-shaped Beverly Hills signs, before decent urban planning could be enjoyed once again. Extravaganza Blvd was universally regarded as a flop.]
Randi’s only virtue was that his attention was 100% riveted on the screen. He missed nothing. After the following PREVIEWs lapsed into faintly-recollected memory, the threatening, muttering mullah logo of Kemmendine Pictures dissolved into the anxiety-ridden strings-scored darkness of pre-Main Title anticipatory timelessness. Willingly, those predatory ball bearings absorbed every artifact that took advantage of the persistence of vision to which he now subjected himself.
Butterbugs’ first picture was thus unspooling through the Simplex projectors up there in the booth. And as we know, it was not only the youthful fellow’s first picture, he was the bloody star of it, for blood sakes.
There. The last shot: a huge close-up of Butterbugs, his character dying from an unjust war. Camera dollies further in, and there, we see a sole tear slowly making its way down his cheek. Cue music. Final fade-out. Cue exit music. Houselights slowly up.
There, glinting in the soft, post-cinematic light, the ball bearings shed tears. Not just one, either. For the first time? Probably.
There, in one instant, one era of Hollywood was concluded.
And another began.
25.
An Epoch Has Begun!
Randi Chuzzlewit sat in front of his computer, and, his metallic eyes still mercurial with viscous tears, forced himself to write the toughest words he’d ever had to assemble.
Ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka. Ticka-ticka. Ticka-ticka-ticka. Each character he typed was automatically and instantly emailed to the layout software of his waiting media outlets:
Don’t you ever get so all-hell-fired-up by those irritating types hanging about box offices and queues in urban alleys, who want nothing more than to pontificate all about their favorite films, while all the time boring the hell out of us? Well, don’t you? They as people invariably have nothing to do whatever with any of the pictures they promulgate, except to be an insufferable and worthless fan. Yet here they are, ‘presenting’ ‘their’ given flick to us, as if they were David Weisbart, or Carsetta Wugg-Luff, or someone! Why is it that we must endure this plastic-covered promotion with any sort of sincerity, especially when there is not one studio or producer – the very makers of the pictures which these tiresome loser fans take on as their own – that can even begin to sell a picture to the public without some sort of cynical angle attached to its chassis?
Is it just because these petty fans ‘discover’ the given picture earlier than others, and thus it establishes their purpose as alleged human beings? I hate these people, and I invariably hate the pictures that they so enthusiastically ‘promote’. I can tell you this: Howard Strickland would have no time for them, as they tend to potentially push audiences away. They are always of unpleasant appearance, too. Grubby, with suet or meat pudding complexions, fat-fat-fat, and slobbery, too. Or else they think they’re goddam Donald Fagan or someone, holding an oily cigarette as if it’s some conductor’s magical baton, and they expect you to follow them if you watch it wave. I tell you, I hate them. AND ‘their’ films!
In my mouth right now, there is a taste of stale turkey-water, inflicted with worm-like eggplant slime and mealy liver mash. It’s terrible, and I want to throw up, but I’m outraged that I’d have to eat my own vomit, just to prove my point to all you horrible people out there.
I cannot proceed further without slinging fœtid mud in all directions. For I must now pretend like I am interested in being a film critic. It is easy to damn the public, but is it easy to damn a film? Not likely, especially when it is the masses who ultimately judge a picture by their profferings at the box office. Even though this sick-making truth is as mundane as a box of Borax, why should I cry out against the universe of profit? I have taken part in it as much as the no-account warthogs, pinwheels and panhandlers I take to the verbal cleaners every time I clack my aging fingernails on these here keys!
If I am essentially an unjust, unjustified and unprincipled person, it is you who have made me that way. Yea! You, my readers. And when I say my readers, I mean literally billions of you out there in search of some bit of cinematic entertainment to punctuate your pathetic lives. You see, I have a generic contempt for all things which move, especially celluloid, which runs through a light beam betwixt an arc rod and an anamorphic or otherwise lens. As if you people can even fathom what I’m talking about here. I see you as passive nobodies, sitting there in the dirt, eating nastiness while you see unjust war or simpering comedy up there on the screen. Then you rise, surrounded by your own rubbish, and exit, your asses facing the source of your diversion, thus showing your own kind of contempt for your ‘window on the world’. How can you pretend to think that I am a bad boy when you yourselves are guilty of far greater crimes. That’s why I don’t like you. Not a single one of you. Not at all.
Forward to Glory Page 30