Uncle Scoopy's Fun House

Melvyn and Howard

1980

This time it is Tuna who carries the load on the reviews, based upon his personal connection to the story, as follows:

In April of 1976, I was working for Hughes Aircraft when we received word that Howard Hughes was dead. There was a tribute over the loudspeaker. Those who had worked there during the days that Howard himself showed up at the factory started remembering, and told some fascinating stories. Howard would show up in jeans and a dirty shirt with an entourage of three piece suits behind him. They would talk to the "clipboard people" also known as middle managers, while Howard would talk to the rank and file workers. Evidently, Howard would listen attentively to the workers, and was known to have replaced managers that he got complaints about.

During one such visit, he bummed a dime from someone I knew for a cup of coffee (Hughes never carried money with him), then talked him out of one of his two meat loaf sandwiches, sat down next to him, and they had lunch together. Several weeks later, he received a handwritten thank you letter from Hughes with a dime taped to it. He didn't think to save it. Hughes parlayed a small company left to him by his father called Hughes Tool Company into his enormous wealth and empire with the help of a group of talented and loyal people. He promised them a job for life, and these people were known as untouchables.

There was still one of them at the facility I worked for, who chose to work second shift, and had offices in a double-wide trailer inside the facility. To avoid his salary depleting anyone's budget, they would transfer administrative responsibility for him from department to department. An eager young manager in one such department looked at his staff, decided this man was not producing anything for him, and handed him a layoff notice on Friday. When the manager got home, his wife was in the driveway waving madly. It seems the president of Summa Corporation, the non-profit that managed Hughes Aircraft and Hughes Tool, was holding to speak with him. The message was simple. "I want to acquaint you with a fact of life at Hughes Aircraft. If we suffer massive setbacks, and there are two people left in Space Systems, you and this gentleman, kindly lay yourself off."

One night at the Culver City facility, a man in paint splattered trousers and a sweat shirt and sneakers tried to walk into the facility, and wouldn't stop to show a badge until the security guard pointed a gun at him. The guard called his sergeant, saying that he was holding some jerk claiming to be Howard Hughes at gunpoint, after the man had tried to break into the plant with no ID. The sergeant asked him how the man was dressed. When he heard the answer, knowing that Hughes often came to the facility and raced cars on his private airstrip, then toured the plant, and always dressed that way, he rushed over to rescue Hughes from the young guard.

Shortly after Hughes death, a so called "Mormon will" surfaced, awarding much of his fortune to 16 people, including a simple milkman named Melvin Dummar. Melvin told a story that he picked up a ragged old man nearly unconscious near the side of the road, drove him to Vegas, and loaned him a quarter. That man claimed to be Howard Hughes. This film is Melvin's story, or at least his side of it, and starts with the road incident. Melvin was working a factory job at the time, and lived in a trailer with his wife, played brilliantly by Mary Steenburgen, and his daughter. The next morning, his motorcycle is repossessed, and his wife leaves him. The nudity, breasts and buns, come from Steenburgen, when he serves her divorce papers at a strip club, where we also see some anonymous strippers. When she finds herself very pregnant, they remarry. She wins big in a TV game show, and they buy a house, possibly finally getting their piece of the American dream, but the wastrel Dummar brings home a Cadillac convertible and boat, so Steenburgen leaves for good.

He eventually marries a Mormon woman who works in the milk plant where he is now working, and they move to Utah to run a filling station/tire store. This is where he received the Mormon will. This will, of course, was a serious setback for Summa Corporation, and had direct bearing on important defense plants. You conspiracy theorists can make of that what you will. The will was thrown out of Clark County Superior Court in June 1978. No court-recognized will was ever found.

This Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) film was highly acclaimed, and elevated the factual story of the Mormon will to something more, by showing people who live on the cusp of the American dream, never quite reaching it. The real Melvin Dummar played a small role in the film. According to Rotten Tomatoes, the critics were 100% positive. I found it a little slow, but then I knew the story well before I ever saw the film, and, other than the Hughes incident, Melvin lived a rather depressing and ordinary life. IMDB readers have this at 7.1 of 10. I have no opinion as to whether the Mormon will was genuine, but, as you can see from the anecdotes at the beginning of this review, it was rather "Hughes-like."

Scoop's brief notes:

This is a surprisingly engaging movie, a true story (well, one version of the truth, anyway) about a lower class guy who ends up in one of Howard Hughes' wills because he once gave Hughes a charitable ride into Vegas without knowing who it was. (Hughes looked like an old bum out in the desert).

Melvin Dummar was one of life's losers, and this movie tells us that. He was a nice guy, and he had some charm, but he never succeeded at anything until he found himself the inheritor of $160 million in the Hughes will, and became the subject of national scrutiny and attention. Although it is based on an actual incident, it is fundamentally Dummar's version of the incident. It's a pretty good yarn though. At one point, Dummar forces Hughes to sing (or walk home!), and their time together is quite touching. Jason Robards really hit all the right notes in his few minutes as Howard Hughes. I wrote elsewhere that Robards did more to give Hughes dimension in these few minutes than DiCaprio did in the entire film of The Aviator.

Mary Steenburgen's nude scene is one of my favorites, although it's in funky strip-club lighting. She quits her job as a stripper by tearing off her costume completely, and walking out of the club stark naked. Unfortunately, Steenburgen's full-frontal nudity, which was visible in the full-screen VHS version of the film, could not be seen in the widescreen DVD, which shows breasts and buns only.

Raw screen grabs

The Brown Bunny

2003

Chloe Sevigny film clips

Scoop's notes:

This film is quite famous, albeit for three things somewhat unrelated to the appeal of the project.

Chloe Sevigny fellated director/star Vincent Gallo on camera in real time.
Gallo promoted the film with a gigantic billboard overlooking Sunset Boulevard, featuring what Gallo envisioned to be a non-objectionable version of the blow job scene.
The film caused a major feud between critic Roger Ebert and Gallo.

THE FEUD

After a 118 minute version of the film was roundly booed at Cannes, Mr. Ebert told a TV crew outside the theater that The Brown Bunny was: "The worst film in the history of the festival. I have not seen every film in the history of the festival, yet I feel my judgment will stand."

With the wit and grace of Oscar Wilde, Mr. Gallo responded: "If a fat pig like Roger Ebert doesn't like my movie, then I'm sorry for him."

"It is true that I am fat," Ebert rejoined, "but one day I shall be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny."

Responding to Ebert's oblique reference to a noted example of Churchillian wit, Gallo fired back a Shavian bon mot of his own: 'Oh yeah, well you tell that bastard I curse his prostate and I hope it blows up to the size of a cantaloupe.'

This turned out to be a particularly unfortunate comment, because Mr. Ebert was soon diagnosed with colon cancer, but Roger took it in stride and joked, "I am not too worried. I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny."

If you missed it all, you can catch up on the whole feud here

The story has sort of a happy ending, I suppose. Gallo recut the film to 92 minutes for its theatrical release and Ebert awarded three stars to the revised version, while praising Gallo for recognizing that much of his footage needed excising.

THE BILLBOARD

Here is the famous billboard. If you click on it you can see a much larger version.

Given today's moral climate, many passing motorists seemed to find it objectionable, and the "powers that be" soon took it down, much to Gallo's chagrin.

"I'm extremely disappointed. I just wanted to make what I thought would be the most beautiful billboard in the world. I used very extreme, bold composition and font and imagery because I felt that it related to the aesthetic sensibility of the film. Unfortunately, the billboard was reduced to something that it really wasn't."

THE BJ

Well, what is there to say? Vince takes out a good size wang, keeps it constantly hard as if he were an experienced porno trouper, and Chloe gobbles it. The money shot is in her mouth, so we can't tell if that is simulated, but the rest of it is obviously very real with everything shown on camera in real time.

THE FILM

SPOILERS:

Ah, yes. The film.

It's existential cinema verité, European minimalist style, (deliberately) close to a home movie in style. It could easily be a Bruno Dumont film. Vince rides from New Hampshire to California, haunted by the grief of a painful betrayal and his loss of the betrayer. As he viewed it, his beloved Daisy had turned out to be no truer to his mental picture of her than had Jay Gatsby's famous Daisy.

Along the way he rides a motorcycle at the Bonneville Salt Flats, stops in a pet shop to ask about the life-span of bunnies, stops and talks to some hookers and convenience store clerks, stops and provides wordless consolation to a kindred spirit (former supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, once one of the most famous women in the world, now making her acting debut at age 56). Mostly he just drives, while the camera watches traffic through his front window. Lots of traffic. There's highway traffic, small-town New England traffic, Las Vegas traffic, interstate highway traffic, wet traffic in the rain, dry traffic in the desert. Anonymous cars. Anonymous people. The film must be about 50% "windshield cam". Sometimes, for a real change of pace, there are no cars; just an open road. Ah, but would not the true existentialist counter that the absence of cars is just another form of traffic, just as a musical rest is another tool of musical composition? Occasionally the camera switches to close-ups of Vince's pained face, but then we get right back to traffic again. Even when the camera is on Vince's face as he drives, we can see traffic in the background. Even if we can't actually see it, we can sense its presence.

It's the Citizen Kane of traffic films.

Luckily the stretches of filmed traffic are exactly long enough for the kind of background songs in which singer-songwriters wail their mournful phrases about lost happiness, while strumming eerie, hollow acoustic guitar chords.

I'll bet it's been a while since you heard Gordon Lightfoot.

In fact, the last time you heard Lightfoot, other people were actually making films like this, films which tried to strip away the conventions of mainstream commercial filmmaking and just show something genuine, with the camera apparently recording real life in real time. My guess is that every single student film at NYU in 1973 resembled this film. In some ways, this is the classic late-60s-early-70s contemplative road movie about a search for some peace of mind, some quiet for a troubled soul inside a soul-destroying world. There's lots of regret, sadness, grief, and thoughts about roads not taken. You will see at the end that the action does not drift aimlessly. In fact, if you really pay attention, the ending of the film will clarify what has gone before, and even show you why the hotel room scene and the BJ seemed to be told from a subjective POV, in contrast to the stark objective realism of many other scenes.

Is there catharsis? Resolution? Does Vince's character find the peace he seeks?

Fuggaboudit!

"He's a destroyed soul, he will continue to act out until he peters out and dies. There's no epiphany, no catharsis, no awakening." - Vincent Gallo, speaking of his character Bud Clay in The Brown Bunny

Unless you enjoy "the art of the moment" - the capture of and lingering indulgence in a mood in a moment of time - this is not the movie for you. To call its pace slow would be tantamount to calling tectonic shifts slow. If you reduce the story to essential narrative, devoid of atmosphere and mood, it would be less than 30 minutes long. If necessary, it could easily be cut back to a 30 minute episode for The Hitchhiker. And even at that length it would not be particularly satisfying. Or particularly economical!

Gallo is a unique filmmaker. He's the classic auteur pouring his passion out from his soul. He does not travel with an entourage or employ much of a crew. His ending credits, excluding the mandatory music credits, must be about the shortest in history. He might have just substituted "it's all me." Nothing wrong with that really. People have interpreted that as narcissism and egomania, but I don't buy that interpretation. It's just a guy producing and directing his own personal movies the way he wants to make them and controlling every aspect, including cinematography and editing. Don't writers do that? Gallo is simply doing with his film what Dostoyevsky did with the printed page - crying out in personal anguish, and making every word and comma his own.

Is the film worth watching?

Well, Gallo's film has many defenders among those who enjoy a certain type of alternative minimalist filmmaking. The critical scores were not bad overall (43% at RT, 49 at Metacritic), although the mediocre overall score does not accurate reflect the love-hate polarization of the critiques. Some find it unwatchable, some find it offensive, others call it a masterpiece.

Do not count me in that latter group.

I didn't enjoy The Brown Bunny. Yes, there is some emotional payoff in the last five minutes of the film, but I just can't imagine that more than 1% of you could ever make it that far. The first 70% of the film is so slow and so tedious that you'll give up unless you just have to see that blowjob.

Oh, yeah, the title. Well, if I get where he's going, the brown bunny he sees in the pet shop is something that looks beautiful and sweet but has a very short life-span. Like love. I suppose that the anticipated death of the bunny foreshadows not only the end of love after a short time, but also the end of Daisy after a short life.

Raw screen grabs

Saturday

Melvyn and Howard

The Brown Bunny

Anna Nicole Smith: Exposed

Flesh Gordon

Flesh Gordon 2

Scandalous Behaviour

Virtual Girl

Pics

Film Clips