to this.

This is the story told in Historic Photos of Los Angeles, a book of neat pictures by Dana Lombardy. It’s a compilation of archival photos: page after page of buildings, vintage cars, movie stars, pricey bars and salty tars, presented with helpful captions explaining their historical context. 

It made me realize how history-starved I am. My complaint about this town has long been that there is no history here; I’ve been to London and every third pub has a plaque over a corner chair reminding you that Dickens used to drink right here or Henry V killed a couple of his wives here after hours. In Los Angeles that pub would have been torn down a dozen times by now and replaced with newer, flimiser pubs. Here in this book is the evidence, the buildings that are long gone; the ones that inexplicably survive surrounded by entirely new buildings.

Lombardy has an eye for good pictures too. It’s all monochrome fare from 1870-1967 (the last shot is of the first Super Bowl at the LA Coliseum) and mostly gorgeous, though one cannot guarantee quality when all the shots come from different photographers, let alone different camera technologies. And as a history of Los Angeles it’s imperfect; the captions are written around the pictures, so whatever history you get is designed to explain the image. If there isn’t a picture of William Mulholland, you don’t learn anything about the guy who brought us all that water. And I don’t know if there is one because there isn’t an index. I didn’t find a picture anyway. I did, however, have a glass of water while looking for it.

Still, why quibble. Your home town could produce a book like this but I bet you wouldn’t find a shot of Lana Turner or Lizbeth Scott. Or a shot of Frank Sinatra getting fingerprinted when he applied for a gun license. 

You know what? Maybe we got history after all.

Box Office Weekly #121 (MP3 - 16 MB - 23 min)

In today’s show, weekend box office figures, TV ratings and these stories: news of the news… you thought it was annoying when they put forced real soft drinks in the hands of movie characters, this summer it’s the other way around… and in this week’s commentary I explain why I like the worst movie ever made. All this and no actors strike so far, today on Box Office Weekly.

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Some correction to Dan’s fine and funny previous article: Invasion From Inner Earth is not Canadian, visual evidence to the contrary. It was made in and around Rhinelander, Wisconsin, a frozen outpost near the Upper Michigan border. The film’s creator is the legendary “bad” filmmaker Bill Rebane. To set his ouvre into perspective, two of his more notable features– Monster A Go-Go and The Giant Spider Invasion– were featured on “Mystery Science Theatre 3000.”

(My business partner talked to Bill Rebane on the phone a few times. When we first set up our DVD authoring business, he called to see how much we would charge to make a DVDs of several of his films. I recall we estimated around $30 per, which was way, way too much for him.)

This phrase in the body of Dan’s article intrigued me:

And anyway, I managed to get my paws on something that I had long considered the worst movie ever made. I have since decided that estimation was callow and naive - it is, however, probably the worst movie ever RELEASED.

Dan’s assessment of the awfulness of this film is even more intriguing considering it was released in 1974 (it was actually filmed in 1972). Pre-digital films were in no way easy or cheap to make. A low-budget movie in this era was in all likelihood shot in 16mm or 3-perf 35mm, in the old-school mode: crystal-sync sound, slated shots, dailies, resulting in work prints and mag audio film which were hand-edited into double-system masters on a Moviola. Even crummy movies required a small army of skilled technicians and the costly services of a film lab just to get the post-production done.

There was a thriving market for exploitation and drive-in fare in the 1970s, and even artistically challenged films like Mr. Rebane’s (because they were, after all, some form of monster movie) could get wide distribution. As a kid I saw The Giant Spider Invasion in a movie theatre, the second half of a double-bill with Demon Seed (which was a big-budget sci-fi film, despite the Exorcist-themed title. Its logline: HAL 9000 has baby fever).

So, results notwithstanding, It took a lot of money and effort to put out even bad films back then. Their shortcomings could be blamed on lack of budget, which made the director’s vision difficult to fully realize (Of course, a bad script is a bad script, but as Dan pointed out, a director like Ed Wood could squeeze some entertainment value out of a crummy story). But the observation that no budget was primary factor of their badness is probably wrong.

We’re now deep in the digital filmmaking era. The former limiting factors of analog filmmaking– lab costs, sound synching, negative conformation, etc.– are simply not issues anymore. In fact, if some addled auteur decided to create a shot-by-shot remake of Invasion From Inner Earth — snowmobiles, red-gelled flashlights, the whole smash– It could be produced single-handedly, and essentially for free. And as this ill-advised remake would be shot on an HD prosumer camcorder, edited with full digital effects and digital color correction (also for free), it would also be of superior technical quality to the original. In fact, the addled filmmaker would have to work very hard to achieve the authentic grainy, crummy, cheap look of the original.

Alright, what’s up then? Why is it in 2008 we’re deluged by unwatchable, self-indulgent, badly written indie crap? Did you know there were some 5000 movies available to the domestic distribution market last year, most of which were unreleasably bad?

It’s a crisis. There is a widely distributed article from IndieWIRE that details the problem of too many truly bad digital movies and a vanishing market for them. From Andrew O’Hehir’s 6-24 follow-up article on Salon.com:

Then there’s the fact that while enthusiasm, access to technology and an eagerness to become famous may be widespread, talent and craftsmanship are not. As anybody who’s ever served on a film-festival selection committee learns the hard way, most of those movies should never have been made in the first place and definitely should not be inflicted upon the public. There has indeed been an explosion of ultra-low-budget filmmaking — just try to wade through the self-produced movies available on YouTube — but so far it has not revealed a nation full of unheralded Orson Welleses in embryo. If anything, it has produced a deluge of abysmal crap that makes the genuine discoveries harder to see. As Gill acidly observed: “The digital revolution is here, and boy does it suck.”

We used to have a hearty laugh at old-school bad filmmmakers like Bill Rebane, Edward D. Wood Jr., Ray Dennis Steckler (The Incredibly Strange Creatures etc. etc. etc.) and Arch Hall Sr. (Eeegah!). But think about how hard it was to make a releasable movie in the days before Digital Video and Final Cut Pro, how much money and how many resources it took to simply commit a script to film. Considering what we’re dealing with now, maybe we were a tad unkind.

–Skot C.

When I was growing up, there was a clearly designed hierarchy to movies on television. The best of the best played in theaters, then five years later they’d show up on one of the major networks. Another five years and they’d go to the local stations. Some product wasn’t that good though and it would just bypass the networks and go straight to the locals. Often local stations would buy a package of movies. There’d be three or four big movies in the package, and another ten that never made it to the networks, and then the package would be rounded out with four or five movies that NOBODY wanted. They’d throw ‘em in just for numbers sake, and to amortize the cost of these unwanted features. The stations would show them, if at all, very late at night or anywhere that they had a hole on the schedule that they had already given up on. These movies were alternatives to dead air.

And surely that was the circumstance behind my sole viewing of INVASION FROM INNNER EARTH, which ran one weekday afternoon on Channel 8 in Salinas. It’s a Canadian science fiction story, made in 1973, taking place mostly in an isolated cabin in the middle of the woods, eh? The very cheap look of it was what caught my eye at first - clumsy cutting, drab sets, good-looking but unmotivated actors. You know what? I don’t have to describe it. You can watch it here. The rights lapsed on it and now it’s a free download on Archive.org. That’s right, INVASION FROM INNER EARTH is officially worthless.

I say you can watch it, but you won’t. You may try. But one of the things that makes it such a bad movie is the phenomenal lack of narrative drive. Here’s the story. Somehow, the world is ending. everywhere people are mysteriously dying across the globe. Aliens are clearly involved. Since this premise is a challenge to convey with a limited budget, the filmmakers focus on a pilot and some scientists who land in a remote area and struggle with their increased isolation. They can’t get anyone on the radio, they can’t get anyone on the phone, and now and then they are scanned by a mysterious red light which looks suspiciously just like a flashlight beam with a gel over it.

Now and then they get a radio message from a guy who claims he’s human, but he has a very deep voice with a heavy reverb on it. Oh, and he speaks in a monotone. There are intimations that he may, in fact, be the alien.

I think the only reason this hasn’t gotten the cult following that PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE has is because it’s almost no fun. Say what you will about PLAN 9, there is at least never a dull moment. They jump from one bad scene to another. INVASION (originally titled THEY, incidentally) is hilariously static. It’s funny the same way a Mike Meyers gag is funny. You know how Dr. Evil tells his kid to Zip it, and then there is a five minute scene where Scott Evil tries to talk and Dr. Evil comes up with dozens and dozens of variations on the term “zip it?” The gag is funny at first because he’s telling his kid to shut up, then it’s funny because he repeats, then it’s not funny, then it’s funny because he’s sitll doing it, then he’s still doing it and that’s hysterical.

In INVASION, a character boldly decides to take the snowmobile to try to find civilization, and the next three minutes are long shots of him riding the snowmobile, with library music blaring over it all. Believe me, if you’re on the right wavelength (you can take drugs if it helps you get there) then this sequence is twice as funny as Dr. Evil. 

The pleasure I get from watching this movie is pure schadenfreude. Every passing minute I think, OMG! They actually thought they were getting away with this! The whole 90 minutes, structurally, is that snowmobile scene. Then it culminates in a finale which I couldn’t put in words if I wanted to, but suffice to say it’s not a disappointing non sequitur only because there would have to be an alternate satisfying ending and believe me, it wasn’t comin’.

You kind of have to appreciate the way that good movies are constructed to enjoy the wrong choices this one makes. Read your Syd Field, your Joseph Conrad, your Robert McKee before watching INVASION FROM INNER EARTH. Otherwise, you won’t know what it’s missing, and it will just be a joke without a punch line.

-daniel k.

It does something no Pixar film has yet done: mix live-action inserts into the realistically animated scenes. WALL-E, the incredibly cute robotic protagonist of the piece, has a job compacting garbage in the ruins of an abandoned city and stacking the trash cubes into immense towers. He spends his nights obsessively watching an ancient VHS tape of Hello Dolly! (d. Gene Kelly, 1969). And not a CG-imitation version: the real thing, an actual clip of Michael Crawford and Marianne McAndrew (and interestingly, not Barbra Streisand: cheaper appearance residual payments!). Fred Willard also makes a sly on-camera cameo as an ineffectual George W. Bush type. The combination of live action, incredibly vivid computer animation and visual design assisted by Roger Deakins (The Coen Brothers’ favored DP) has resulted in a film that is at times breathtakingly beautiful and cinematic.

The first half of the story is stark and simple, a tale of a lonely robot meeting another one in a desolate cityscape. The second half takes place in a humongous spaceship in which humanity has escaped their polluted, used-up home planet. And as this half develops, I recognized a strangely familiar premise being presented.

WALL-E takes place 700 years in the future. Between now and this time, a large Costco or Wal-Mart like corporation called Buy-N-Large takes over everything everywhere. It’s hyper-consumerist ways eventually produce so much garbage, pollution and environmental degradation that its customers (that is, the human race) are ferried off-planet, leaving an army of robots behind to clean up. Meanwhile, the people on the ship have evolved into the ultimate consumers: Sessile blobs who cannot move off their floating couches, constantly staring at a video screen which floats in front of their faces, unaware of their very surroundings.

The Mike Judge film Idiocracy (2006: I reviewed it here a few months ago) painted an almost identical dystopian scenario three years ago (it got delayed a year in release). In the future of Idiocracy the story actually gets into gear when the protagonist’s suspended-animation casket is delivered via an avalanche from an immense tower of trash. There are more companies in existence in this universe than in WALL-E’s, but a centerpiece location is a gigantic Costco, so vast it stretches off into the horizon and so cavernous crashed planes stick out of it. Brawndo, a sports-drink manufacturer, also figures into the plot, as a corporation so large they bought the FDA and basically replaced all sources of drinkable water with its beverage.

Future humans are basically represented the same way in both films: hyper-consumers who have become hopelessly dependent on the machines that keep them alive. And the point of depicting them as such is the same in both films: these pampered, infantile, soft people are obviously us. These two films look so much alike in some scenes they could conceivably be the same storyline. Idiocracy is part 1, before the Earth is evacuated: WALL-E is part 2, after we’ve taken off for space.

But there are differences, mostly in the attitude of the filmmakers. Mike Judge is cynical: We are a stupid, doomed race, and the efforts of the relatively smart, present-day hero to save humanity only delays our inevitable extinction. The folks at Pixar believe people are basically good and kinda smart, and the creative efforts of robots and humans alike are a constant source of hope.

Legend has it WALL-E is the final project generated at a single idea session at Pixar, one that also generated Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. No doubt that may be so, but the details look a lot like something from a 3-year-old failed satire.

–Skot C.