My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  The posters yielded instant results: In addition to Jackie Gleason and a 77-year-old Groucho Marx, Preminger scored supporting roles for such young people’s favorites as Arnold Stang, Mickey Rooney, George Raft, Peter Lawford, Slim Pickens, and Preminger’s fellow Batman villains Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, and Burgess Meredith. And don’t forget Carol Channing. Can’t make a counterculture movie without Carol Channing.

  In Skidoo, low-level hood gone straight “Tough Tony” Banks (Gleason) and his sidekick (Stang) spy on Tough Tony’s flower-child daughter (Alexandra Hay) in a car with a hippie played by John Phillip Law, who looks like a cross between Tonto and Jesus, and communicates through Zen koans like, “If you can’t dig nothing, then you can’t dig anything, you dig?” Sitar noodling accompanies his stoned musings; apparently if you smoked pot in the ’60s, an invisible sitar player followed you around providing mood music.

  Our corpulent hero soon has more to worry about than his daughter’s shaggy paramour when another mobster (Romero) tells him he’s being called out of retirement to kill an imprisoned numbers man (Mickey Rooney) who plans to rat on enigmatic mob kingpin “God” (Marx). Tony is reluctant to kill (or “kiss,” in the film’s terminology) his best friend, but when his sidekick catches a bullet in the forehead, he realizes that he has no choice in the matter: It’s an order, not a suggestion. While Tony glumly sets about executing his new assignment in Alcatraz, his daughter begins living the hippie nightmare: being stripped, then body-painted in a smelly van while spacey hippies sing old folk songs while toking and staring glumly at nothing in particular.

  In prison, Tony meets his cellmates: a recidivist bookworm rapist (Michael Constantine) and Fred the Professor, a floppy-haired, walrus-mustache-sporting draft dodger played by Austin Pendleton, who steals the film with his loopy line readings and daft sweetness. He’s the heart and soul, a gentle man in a cruel, impersonal, technology-crazed, fully automated world.

  Speaking of fully automated and technology-crazed: Channing’s Flo Banks, decked out in canary yellow and feathers so she looks disconcertingly like a drag queen Big Bird, decides to seduce low-level mob flunky Angie (Frankie Avalon) into revealing the whereabouts of her AWOL husband. She attempts this in his tricked-out bachelor pad, a technological utopia/dystopia where everything is managed by remote control.

  The film then unleashes a horror beyond words, beyond reason, beyond even madness: 46-year-old Carol Channing, stripped down to her bright yellow underwear, writhing suggestively on Angie’s bed.

  Skidoo suffers from a surplus rather than a dearth of ideas. It just needs a strong authorial voice to marshal all those weird notions and trippy conceits into a strong, cohesive whole. Take this example: While licking a piece of Fred’s “special” stationery, Tony ends up accidentally ingesting LSD. The history of LSD freak-outs on film is long and painful. Taking LSD is a powerful, ineffable experience. It’s hard to put into words, and even harder to render cinematically, so filmmakers resort to hokey surrealism, rinky-dink special effects, cheap camera tricks, over- and underexposed film, and other hackneyed attempts to capture the uncapturable.

  Preminger was no exception. After Tony mistakenly drops acid, two characters shrink to munchkin size. He then begins seeing scarlet triangular orbs, disembodied eyeballs, guns, strange numbers written in bullet holes, and climactically, the floating disembodied head of God atop a screw. It’s kitschy psychedelia-for-beginners as a bug-eyed Tony sweats his way to an epiphany: His daughter isn’t really his daughter, and he’s okay with that, having lost his ego at the behest of kindly spiritual guide Fred the Professor and LSD.

  Skidoo is essentially about one man’s liberation through mind-expanding psychedelics, yet pre- and post-LSD, Tony appears borderline suicidal. Gleason was going through a vicious depression when he shot Skidoo, and collaborating with a ruthless, glowering tyrant like Preminger—who tellingly had a lucrative sideline playing Nazis on stage and in film, most notably in Stalag 17—did little to improve his disposition.

  In a film all about squares and freaks coming together in acid-and-weed-saturated bliss, Channing’s character becomes the great uniter. Flo instantly gets the hippies. She doesn’t need to drop acid to see the interconnectedness of all mankind. That’s what makes her such a freak. Also strangely beautiful—but mainly a freak.

  Skidoo ends the way it must: with Flo, inexplicably dressed as George Washington, singing the theme song and gyrating creepily like a marionette while leading a hippie armada of guitar-toting freaks onto Marx’s floating fortress of uptightitude. With Tony’s homemade hot-air balloon arriving on board the ship at the exact same moment. And with Tony and Flo celebrating their reunion by making sweet, sweet love (thankfully off-camera), thereby rendering everything perfect forever.

  In the movie’s groovy, generous world, even the bad guy gets away scot-free: The film ends with Fred the Professor and God in guru robes, sharing a joint and a wavelength as they sail off into their next epic trip.

  Watching Skidoo for the third time—Christ, I really am a pop-culture masochist—I warmed to it not necessarily for what it is but rather for what it tries to be and what it could have been. In his biography Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, Foster Hirsch praises the film for its non-judgmental portrayal of the ’60s counterculture. In Preminger’s open, sweetly misguided film, hippies aren’t just smarter, more spiritually attuned, and happier than everyone else, they’re also more patriotic. The idea that hippies might just be better Americans than flag-waving cultural troglodytes like Tony is sneakily subversive and strangely winning. Preminger’s celebration of a subculture he admired but didn’t begin to understand serves as a singular time capsule of a time, place, and cultural divide that has only grown greater in the ensuing four decades.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Austin Pendleton On Skidoo

  Austin Pendleton is one of those delightful character actors who elevate everything they appear in. The elfin Tony-nominated actor, playwright, and director has appeared in more than 40 films, including Catch-22, What’s Up, Doc?, The Front Page, The Muppet Movie, and My Cousin Vinny in addition to his extensive work in the theater.

  Austin Pendleton: The original screenplay the film was developed from was written by a guy I knew slightly in New York named Bill Cannon. He had written this movie called Brewster McCloud. He had seen me in a play and he had wanted me to play Brewster McCloud. It was in the early days of independent film. It was in the mid-’60s, I’d say. I read it and I loved it. I thought it was terrific and an incredible part. I couldn’t believe it, because I had never been in a movie. So I said, “Great! I’ll do this.” But then he couldn’t get it on. He couldn’t get it produced at the time though it was ultimately made by Robert Altman.

  So then he called me up, and he’s like, “I’ve written a more commercial screenplay called Skidoo, and I’ve written a supporting part for you in that. So hopefully it’ll be easier to get Skidoo made, and we’ll attract some names for a couple of the lead roles, and you’ll be really good in this supporting role, so then we can get Brewster McCloud made.” And I said, “Well that’s sweet of you.” [Laughs.] Skidoo was like the Brewster McCloud screenplay: It was very ’60s and very fragmented and the product of someone very, very talented. So then Bill called me one day and said, “I’ve sold Skidoo!” I said, “Great, dude. To who?” I thought it would be like early Brian De Palma.

  Nathan Rabin: Or a Peter Fonda type.

  AP: He said, “Otto Preminger.” I said, “Have you lost your mind?” At that time and always since, I have been a fan of Otto Preminger’s, but he’s the last director I would think of for a thing like this. And he said, “Oh no, he’s very excited about it.” He’d shown Otto the Brewster McCloud script, and that would have been even more strange. He’d quoted Otto and did an imitation and said [Adopts Austrian accent:] “I like Brewster, but I like better your Skidoo.” So then Bill told Otto, “Okay, but I want you to put this actor named Au
stin Pendleton in it.” Otto tried to get me for a three-picture deal, and I told my agent, “I’m not going to do that.” I don’t know what I missed doing, but I said, “I’m not going to be tied down.” I wish I had gotten a three-picture deal, as it happens, but anyway …

  So I went out there and we began to shoot on the location, which was on the sound stage at Paramount, where all the prison scenes were shot. As I say, it was the first time I’d been in a part of any significance in a movie at all, and the technique of it, I just couldn’t get hold of. I would miss my marks, I was incredibly self-conscious, and Otto kept being pleased with it. I didn’t have a car, I was staying at a motel, at a place called the Players Motel, from which you could walk to Paramount. It was a hotel run for alcoholic actors, run by a couple of old actors who were themselves in AA. So the atmosphere around the pool was really depressing.

  But I would get up early every morning and walk through the back alleys to Paramount. I would see over the buildings, see a big poster for American Airlines, see how many flights to New York, and all I kept thinking is, “I gotta get back to New York. I’m so unhappy here.” And Otto was impatient. He got very particular about everything he wanted, and I thought everything he wanted was wrong. I was thinking the movie was going down the tubes, but I began thinking it was going even more down the tubes than I would have thought. It was like his competence seemed to be eluding him. I thought it would be like a smooth movie that was too old-fashioned. But it wasn’t even that. Scenes were just going down the toilet. I kept calling my agent from the sound stage, saying quietly, “You’ve got to get me out of this.” And she’s saying, “Dear, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not like a play. It’s just, ‘No. You’re in it.’” But I said it would destroy my whole movie career; I was never going to act again. And I was only 28. I was beside myself.

  Then one day we were setting up a shot and Otto was getting increasingly impatient with me. But at the same time, I came in one day and he said [Adopts Austrian accent:] “I have good news for you: We’re going to build you a new, much bigger part so you will be here quite a few more weeks!” And I thought, “Oh, shit! This is like a nightmare. And why can’t he see how little this is working?” But still he was getting impatient with me. At first I thought, “Well, it’s my first film, I can’t hit my marks, can’t do anything.” And the first scene was one in which I was naked, by the way, and that freaked me out. It wasn’t the way to begin. Then one day we were setting up a fairly simple shot: walking down the corridor outside the cells and coming to a stop, and then I go into a cell. And I didn’t hit the marks. And Otto, out of desperation, cried out, “You are amateur!” And before I knew what was coming out of my mouth I said, “I know I am! What are we gonna do about it?” And he just turned on a dime and said, “No, no, I didn’t say you’re an amateur. I just mean you’re inexperienced.” From that point on, he started teaching me what remains about 80 percent of what I know about film acting.

  NR: In Skidoo, your character represents the counterculture. Was that something you felt plugged into?

  AP: I was very into all that.

  NR: Why do you think the counterculture appealed to Otto Preminger at that stage of his life?

  AP: Well I think … and he himself said this—he was a strangely open man. He said things like [Adopts Austrian accent:] “I regret that I had not been more like a hippie.” And he also regretted never having had one homosexual experience. He told me that at one point.

  NR: I’m guessing that wasn’t a come-on.

  AP: No, no. I didn’t get the feeling. Never. If that was that, he didn’t do that. He would never do that. He would with women, but I don’t think he would ever come on to a guy. If I had said to him, “Well, Otto … ,” then he might have gone along with it. It didn’t occur to me. He was just talking about himself and his regrets. What the hippie movement meant to him was that if everybody were more open to all kinds of experiences, the world would be a better place. And that’s what that movement was all about. You slept with everybody, you did every drug, and it did create—which he earnestly tried to re-create in that film, I don’t think with much success—kind of a lovely vibe for a couple of years before everybody freaked out. And Otto was very moved by the idea of looking at life that way.

  NR: The defense of Skidoo in Hirsch’s Preminger biography is that it’s a very non-judgmental take on the counterculture.

  AP: That was the trademark of all his filmmaking. There’s a real objectivity in the way he puts so much stuff into each shot. He doesn’t try to favor one point of view over another. All his best films have that in them. But they all have it in terms of the kind of atmospheres and topics that he understood a little better. But he told me how touched he was by what the hippies were, how hippies saw things, how we saw the possibilities of life—that anything that didn’t do somebody harm was worth exploring. He was genuinely moved by that.

  Good-bye Blue Monday Case File #88: Breakfast Of Champions

  Originally Posted November 27, 2007

  Each generation picks its heroes. That’s why Robert Altman’s death inspired a tidal wave of grief. Altman spoke to my generation like few other filmmakers before or since. Altman had an eternally contemporary sensibility, hip, wry, smartass, and cynical, but with a sneaky streak of empathy and emotional depth. In that respect, he belongs as much to the present and future as the past. The same goes for Kurt Vonnegut.

  Vonnegut is one of those rare writers capable of profoundly altering the way readers perceive the world. He possessed a genius for making the mundane and forgettable seem new, ridiculous, perverse, horrible, and cruel. He had an unparalleled gift for exposing the madness and folly of our materialistic world, and a deft ear for the mindless happy talk of commercials, taglines, ad copy, and all the ephemeral nonsense that whispers relentlessly in our collective ear, telling us that eternal happiness is just a few purchases away.

  At the core of Breakfast Of Champions lies a principled revulsion toward the spiritual emptiness of consumer culture endemic to many of Altman’s scathing social satires. So it’s fitting that Altman wanted to adapt Breakfast Of Champions for the big screen in the mid-’70s with the great Peter Falk as businessperson Dwayne Hoover, the even greater Sterling Hayden as cantankerous science-fiction hack Kilgore Trout, and Ruth Gordon as the wealthy Eliot Rosewater.

  Alas, when Breakfast Of Champions was made into a movie in the late ’90s, Altman wasn’t involved, though his good friend and longtime collaborator Alan Rudolph wrote and directed the adaptation. Altman produced many of Rudolph’s films from this era, but Breakfast boasted an even more venerated producer with an even stronger reputation for valiantly fighting for Rudolph’s artistic vision: Bruce Willis’ brother.

  Not coincidentally, Bruce Willis also stars as Dwayne Hoover, a fabulously well-to-do businessman rapidly coming apart at the seams. While the Midwestern backwater of Midland prepares for an arts festival, Hoover fights a losing battle to maintain his sanity. He is unwittingly on a collision course with Albert Finney’s Kilgore Trout, a writer whose stories pad out the pages of dirty magazines and pornographic books. Nonetheless, he’s been beckoned to appear at the Midland Arts Festival at the request of a wealthy benefactor. Meanwhile, back at Hoover’s car dealership, jittery flunky Harry Le Sabre (Nick Nolte) worries endlessly that his boss will uncover his secret life as a transvestite, while childlike ex-convict Wayne Hoobler (Omar Epps) longs only to work for a man of Hoover’s stature.

  Breakfast deals with the conflict between the smiling, together face we show the outside world and the angry, burbling madness roiling just underneath the surface. It accordingly requires a lead actor touched with a spark of divine insanity, but Willis is too self-assured to inhabit the role convincingly. When he sticks a gun in his mouth and ponders the vast cosmic void, he’s following the directions of the script, not responding to bad chemicals in his brain or the demented prerogatives of fate. History has taught us that no matter how many bad guys fire weapon
s in his direction, or how many Seagram’s Golden Wine Coolers he’s consumed, Willis will emerge smirking and triumphant. The alpha-male swagger that makes him one of our most bankable action stars also makes him a perverse choice to play a man lurching toward a personal and professional nadir from which he can never fully recover.

  In a seedy hotel lounge, Hoover encounters Trout and asks for the meaning of life. Trout hands him a book that takes the form of a letter from the creator of the universe, explaining that everyone in the universe is an automated robot except for the recipient of the letter, who has the glory and the horror of being the only person on Earth capable of free will. This sends Hoover on a crazed spree of unprovoked violence.

  As it heads into the home stretch, Vonnegut’s novel becomes its author’s story as much as his characters’. No longer content to watch from the sidelines, Vonnegut—that kindly, sadistic creator of his literary universe—becomes a character in his own novel, spying on the discord at the hotel lounge from behind mirrored glasses. Vonnegut makes his authorial presence felt in a thousand other little ways as well, from autobiographical asides (or faux-autobiographical asides) to his charmingly simple drawings to the jazz-like use of repetition and recurring themes and motifs.

  Rudolph finds a way to integrate Vonnegut’s drawings into the film, using them in the opening credits and sneaking them into the background like Easter eggs. The elegantly rumpled and ramshackle Finney proves an inspired choice to play Trout, Mark Isham’s score does a much better job of balancing comedy and tragedy than the film, and Epps indelibly embodies his character’s poignantly pathetic dreams.

  But Rudolph gets just about everything else wrong. His screenplay takes pointless liberties with its source material, eliminating the author’s presence and making Hoover’s dead wife a spectral but apparently alive basket case stumbling about in a dreamy Thorazine haze. Most of all, Rudolph botches the book’s tricky tone, a highwire combination of misanthropic satire, bleak philosophizing, and deep, aching sadness.