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| Malcolm McDowell as British rocker Reggie Wanker, exploring his sensitive side. |
GET CRAZY
1983, Kino Lorber, 92m 8s
For all intents and purposes, this is (very nearly) a 40th Anniversary release of Allan Arkush's otherwise hard-to-see follow-up to his 1979 grand slam, ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, a priceless rock movie satire starring the Ramones. As the story goes, GET CRAZY started out as HELLZAROCKIN, written by Danny Opatashu (who - as "Patrick Hobby" - had scripted HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, Arkush's joint directorial debut with Joe Dante), who had known Arkush since they had worked together as stage hands at Bill Graham's legendary Fillmore East. The movie was conceived as a fast-moving satire set at the Fillmore East on the New Year's Eve when the torch was passed from the 1960s to the 1970s.
Incredibly, the executives at Embassy Pictures, who bought the script, didn't feel there was any commercial value in the music and musicians of the late 1960s - you know, people like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix... - so they demanded a contemporary rewrite and brought in Henry Rosenbaum and David Taylor (who had just written the Gene Wilder/Gilda Radner comedy HANKY PANKY) to do it, with Arkush supervising. In the end, the story was revamped to chronicle the New Year's Eve concert staged at the fictitious Saturn Theatre in Los Angeles, with a bill including those superstars you never heard of: King Blues (Bill Henderson, apparently the composer of "Hootchie Cootchie Man"), girl group Nada (fronted by an impressively athletic Lori Eastside), self-destructive punk performer Piggy (Fear's Lee Ving), and finally Reggie Wanker, a composite of every narcissistic cockscentric frontman in rock, rather marvelously distilled in the form of Malcolm McDowell.
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| Gail Edwards as Willy Lohman. |
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| Daniel Stern and Allen Garfield (billed as Allen Goorwitz). |
The filming went beautifully by all accounts, but after finally opening in a few select locations around the country in early August 1983 and drawing largely negative reviews, Embassy yanked the picture from theaters almost as soon as they were booked. The movie didn't reach the important New York market until mid-October, where the same quick disappearing act followed. Janet Maslin of the New York TIMES was one of the few national critics who got it - but, by then, it was too late... and in the supplements to this disc, you'll find a persuasive explanation of why Embassy may have green-lighted the picture without any intention of ever supporting it. A year later, it turned up on cable (where I first saw it, taped it, and started spreading the word about it) and then it disappeared off the face of the earth. Arkush searched high and low to find out what happened to his movie after the dissolution of Embassy Pictures, finding nothing until Kino Lorber notified him last summer that they had the picture and wanted to involve him in its Blu-ray release.
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| Lori Eastside makes her entrance. |
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| Lou Reed as reclusive poet-rocker Auden, with friend. |
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| All this... and the Futtermans, too? |
Hard as it is to believe, this new BD release marks the first time it's been possible to view GET CRAZY in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio since it was shown on theater screens almost 40 years ago. Seeing the film again, one is reminded that it is such a rapid-fire round of sight gags, often compounded with others within the same crowded frame, that it's impossible to fully digest in a single viewing. Indeed, after revisiting the film and then moving on to the supplements - which include a very entertaining Zoom convention reunion with Arkush and most of the principal cast and crew (75m 43s) and an audio commentary by Arkush, filmmaker and historian Daniel Kremer, and filmmaker-fan Eli Roth - even the sharpest trivia heads are likely to be astounded by the galaxy of reference points Arkush wove into its zany tapestry. On first pass, for example, Nada's performance with Piggy is such a manic blur that it seems like a New Wave-festooned punk act, but all the components are actually present in the wardrobe to represent every phase of girl-grouphood going back to its Brill Building origins. Arkush describes this dense concentration of ideas within images as his form of "rock criticism," and it ranges from a spoof of Dylan's BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME cover to the origin of the name Nada (which, to my surprise, had nothing to do with its presumed negativity or denial), and the fact that all the performing bands are playing essentially the same song in extremely different ways. This movie has so many layers of rock in it, it's actual rock - sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic.
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| Bill Henderson delivers the blues. |
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| Nada delivers the blues. |
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| Onetwothreefour! Piggy (Lee Ving) delivers the blues. |
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| Piggy dives into mosh pit. |
The satirical vibe here is like a football huddle between Harvey Kurtzman, the Three Stooges, and Fellini; the rubber bullets it fires are alternately silly, smart, and surreal. The important thing is that the blanks are relatively few, especially if the supporting players are your kind of eye candy: Howard Kaylan of the Turtles, John Densmore of the Doors, Clint Howard, Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Linnea Quigley, and even Jackie Joseph and Dick Miller's first-ever appearance as a married couple. (They next appeared as the Futtermans in Joe Dante's GREMLINS.) The narrative arc is probably unnecessary, and doesn't exactly help the film, but it's about a soulless monetizer of rock 'n' roll, Colin Beverly (Ed Begley Jr.) wanting to take over the Saturn Theatre from Max Wolfe (Allen Garfield/Goorwitz), the Bill Graham-like impresario. Assisting him are two corporate thugs played by former teen idols Fabian and Bobby Sherman, which in itself suggests a detailed footnote, and it builds to a climax in which first-time show-runner Neil Allen (Daniel Stern as the Arkush alter ego) must find and defuse a time bomb before it's set to go off at midnight inside the packed theater.
More important, ultimately, is a running gag about reclusive rocker Auden (Lou Reed) trying to write a song in time to make the show, inside a cab running up an $11,000 fare. Arkush actually tucks his movie's most sublime scene inside his end credits, when some of those 1983 audiences may have already been out the door. As he points out, it's in this last-minute performance that he shows how much can be emotionally invested and can be communicated in the art form at the heart of all the preceding silly business, and he gleefully goes for those chords that put a lump in your throat and a tear in the eye.
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| Daniel Stern, Howard Kaylan as the Garcia-esque Captain Cloud, and Gail Edwards. |
From a critical perspective, I'd have to say the film feels awfully compressed but I'm sure it occurred to Arkush and, in his shoes, I would probably made the same call. Maybe it could have used another 15m of breathing room, but A) I'm guessing he was locked down contractually to a set number of reels, and 2) the sustained excitement, intensity, and hilarity of the thing is ultimately more important than reminding us to breathe. It may not be perfect, but it works the comparative miracle of being at least as much fun to dissect, think about, and talk about as it is to watch. You may notice that Kino Lorber's new 2K master is darker than most we see in HD, but to have made the image brighter would have added surplus grain and diluted the superbly rich color. As it is, this presentation has a juicy, palpable 35mm feel to it, and the close-ups deliver all the detail you could want.
The extras include the aforementioned Zoom "After Party" reuniting much of the cast and crew, the audio commentary, and also an 8m No Dogs In Space "fan fiction" featurette, a Trailers From Hell segment with Arkush (including the original theatrical trailer, natch), and three music videos - one of them reuniting all the gals from Nada.
(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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