NEW HOLLYWOOD 1967-1976

Credit Peter Biskin’s 1998 bestseller Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for the concept behind this year’s Berlinale retrospective tribute to »New Hollywood 1967-1976.« The retro follows exactly the chronicle of maverick Hollywood filmmakers laid down by the former editor of American Film and Premiere.

The retro opens with Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider and closes with Kenneth Bowser’s compilation documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (UK/Canada, 2003), programmed in the Film Museum. Seen at last year’s Cannes film festival, the Bowser documentary links interviews with eye witnesses and key personalities in Biskin’s book together with appropriate excerpts from the films. Anyway, here’s my side of the Easy Rider story ­ the film emblematic of New Hollywood maverick directors who challenged the Hollywood Studio System ­ and won. It all started on the roof of the old Palais des Festivals at the 1969 Cannes festival. After the press screening of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider in the competition, the crowd swept up the stairs to the roof for an ad hoc the press conference feted with scotch-and-canapes. The spokesman for the bikers was Jack Nicholson. Not Hopper, not Peter Fonda, the featured star of the movie. Jack jumped up on a chair and ranted »Yah, man, that’s the way it is!« to peaheads who said they didn’t like »that trip scene« in New Orleans. French critic Robert Chazal, enjoying Jack’s splurge of bravura, wrote: »Like my colleagues, I am amazed by Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider ­ proof that an American Nouvelle Vague exists.« Where was Bob Rafelson, the producer at BBS Productions (one »B« for Bob Rafelson, the other for Bert Schneider) who had backed Easy Rider? Right after the shindig on the roof, he was off to Rome to talk with Orson Welles about a new project that was to come to nought. Bob doesn’t much like critics, he hates interviews, and he adamantly refuses to read anything written about himself. That’s why you won’t find him in the Kenneth Browser documentary.

I caught up with Bob Rafelson some years later ­ in 1994 ­ over pasta at Dan Tana’s in Los Angeles. He talked a bit about Hopper’s Easy Rider, a bit more about Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (»my favorite film under our BBS logo«), but mostly about drifting. He had just returned home to LA from a six-week tramp across Turkey. Everybody who knows Rafelson, knows he’s a compulsive drifter. He’s the Nicholson-Dupree character in Five Easy Pieces (1970), the Nicholson-tramp character in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), and practically all the other Nicholson characters in a half-dozen more Rafelson-directed film. His adaptation of the James Cain classic, competing for laurels at Cannes, delighted the French. Some insisted at the press conference that The Postman had inspired Albert Camus’s The Stranger. I was in LA with a Berlin producer to encourage Bob to finish Wet, his »shortie« in Regina Ziegler’s Erotic Tales series, for a presentation at Cannes. His Wet was the first film in that series of 30 tales. Pierre Rissient, an enthusiastic Cannes supporter of the »American New Wave,« had asked for a work-in-progress cassette. Gilles Jacob saw it, liked it, and programmed it on a warm Sunday afternoon at the 1994 Cannes festival. It was paired with Susan Seidelman’s The Dutch Master, another American Erotic Tales seen at Telluride, under the teasing rubric: Contes de la séduction.

Last year, Tanja Meding, ace associate at Ziegler-Film, flew to LA to see if she could talk Rafelson in to working with a crew from the Berlin Film Academy on a second Erotic Tales, digitally shot. He agreed. Provided he could play the main role ­ »I’ve never really acted in a movie before.« He also asked if he could invite a few friends ­ British playwright Trevor Griffiths and French actress Fabienne Babe ­ to join him before the camera. Here’s how Porn.com goes: Veteran film director Matty Bonkers (Bob Rafelson), a Hollywood legend, arrives in Berlin for an honorary retrospective tribute. While introducing his award-winning Mockery, he receives a phone call from his producer lying in intensive care at a hospital. Blau (Trevor Griffiths) needs a favor for old times’ sake. Could Matty finish a porn movie before his legs get broken by Tokyo Tony? Matty reluctantly agrees. On the set he meets movie star and ex-cello-player Inga (Fabienne Babe) ­ and a skinny porn-star playing Hitler ... Guess what? Porn.com is a hit on the festival circuit (Moscow, Montreal, Belgrade, Thessaloniki, et alia), but it can’t be shown on German public television. The TV commissioner got cold feet. Spoofing Hitler in one thing. Spoofing him in a spoof of a porn film is spooky.

Shortly, Bruno Ganz, the legendary stage-and-screen actor, will interpret the role of Hitler in a German movie. That should melt the ice a bit. When I showed Porn.com to my relatives in the laid-back rural town of Momence near Chicago, where The Road to Perdition was shot, they laughed their heads off.
No matter. One day, Heinz Badewitz will entice Bob Rafelson to attend the Hof film festival for an honorary tribute. Then the German critics and public will have the last word on Porn.com.

Ron Holloway