Before you watch Allan Arkush's Get Crazy (1983), I must warn you it is notably misnamed. I do not mean that as a concert film and backstage comedy it is not wild, absurd, one hundred and ten percent primo bazoo; it is. I mean that the title implies the existence of some baseline of normality from which the film will achieve escape velocity and it must be understood there just ain't no such thing. Insofar as there is a plot scaffolding its cavalcade of in-jokes and anarchy, it concerns a night in the life of a beloved rock venue where the stakes are high and the performers are higher, not to mention the stage crew. Lou Reed sends up Bob Dylan. Crazy comes built in.
Inspired by and dedicated to the director's four years with the Fillmore East, Get Crazy opens scant hours from New Year's Eve, 1982. It's the fifteenth anniversary of the Saturn Theatre (the Wiltern Theatre, effectively playing the Fillmore) and in honor of the occasion, its owner Max Wolfe (Allen Goorwitz), a mensch, a schlub, and an impresario of the old school, is planning to ring in 1983 with "the greatest concert in the history of this city . . . the biggest concert in the history of the world—the country—the universe!" Eyerolls from his employees notwithstanding, he's pulled together a lineup to showcase the history of the Saturn from its Delta blues, acid-folk origins to its latter days of art rock and glam. Old-timers can wave their lighters to the legendary stylings of King Blues (Bill Henderson), a man of such profound cool that he can close out a colleague's funeral with the heartfelt address to the heavens, "God, this is my man, and you better take care of him or I'm going to wax your ass." Young punks can mosh their hearts out to bubblegum nihilist Nada (Lori Eastside), whose cheerleader stunts share stage time with a roundhouse like a mule and a fanbase that's here for it. Everyone screams for Reggie Wanker (Malcolm McDowell), his quintessential rock godhood equally jaded with his aristocratic girlfriend, his private jet, and his ice buckets full of coke. And colder hearts than Max's would melt at the return of Captain Cloud (Howard Kaylan) and the Rainbow Telegraph, a flower-power commune just now fulfilling their booking for New Year's Eve, 1969. "Time's a trip, man," the Captain shrugs apologetically. With a little help from an apparent heart attack, Max has even secured the participation of Auden (Lou Reed), a reclusive folkie sensation of undiminished mystique and questionable attention span. Charged with making this chaos run on time are the indefatigable, occasionally Class B-fueled staff of the Saturn—smart-mouthed, fantasy-prone stage manager Neil Allan (Daniel Stern), eternally unimpressed light op Violetta (Mary Woronov), sound tech and aspiring drummer Arthur (Tim Jones), stagehand and despairing virgin Joey (Dan Frischman), and the lucky drop-in of Willy Loman (Gail Edwards), the former stage manager whom Max still praises as "the best . . . in the business" even when she swears she's out of it for good this time. Determined to bring this chaos to an explosive halt are the forces of gentrification personified by Colin Beverly (Ed Begley Jr.), a celebrity promoter all smarm and sociopathy who never goes anywhere without his matched set of sycophants Mark and Marv (Bobby Sherman and Fabian Forte) and presently the additional toadying of Sammy Fox (Miles Chapin), Max's greed-is-good putz of a nephew. "This building is going down and eighty-eight stories are going up!" Beverly snaps, tossing his Warhol-blond mane at Max like a flag before a hypertensive bull. "So fuck you and fuck rock and roll!" The gauntlet is down. The lines are around the block. A martinet of a new fire inspector (Robert Picardo), a kid sister desperate to see her idol in person (Stacey Nelkin), a biker gang, a ticking bomb, and a briefcase full of the best drugs this side of Sagittarius A* (the visual artistry of Robert Blalack) can't complicate the situation further, can they? Watch and learn.
It is not difficult to imagine a more conventionally human comedy constructed from these premises and indeed Arkush claims he originally intended to make one before finding himself unwittingly Springtime for Hitler'd by producers who wanted a flop to make bank off. I regret to inform him that however ambivalently he may regard his Tashlin-esque translation of the screenplay written by Danny Opatoshu, Henry Rosenbaum, and David Taylor, I love it. You thought Mel Brooks could pack the gags in with a tamping iron? Get Crazy makes Spaceballs (1987) look like the Lubitsch touch. Screwball chases satire trips over slapstick cannons into surrealism. Open a scene with anti-humor and it might well end in Old Comedy. Just so the silent era doesn't feel left out of the double-talk, the action is studded with subtitles: "Boy meets Girl." "The Bad Guys." "Speaking of funerals . . ." "SHOWTIME!!" I'm not even sure this film has set-ups so much as payoffs with unlimited budget. "No alcohol, no drugs, no firearms allowed," the door staff chant as six-packs and homemade stills pile up alongside a small arsenal of confiscated armaments including an aerial bomb while a seven-foot-tall sentient joint is waved on through with his Rasta friends. "One itsy-bitsy open flame in here tonight," the fire inspector tersely warns Neil, "and it's your funeral," so naturally the firebug's sea of matches that greets the opening number is as nothing to the later encouragements of a flamethrower, a fiery cross, a self-immolation, and the half-burnt sentient joint fleeing the fire inspector's wrath shrieking, "Help! Help! He's trying to bring me down!" Stage diving leads to balcony diving leads to a panel of Olympic judges holding up score cards as bodies catapult into the audience. Reggie Wanker in a heap of groupies in his hotel room is barely a joke, but Reggie Wanker gaspingly extricating himself from a solid interlock of groupies like a defututus Jenga block is sex comedy genius. Mark and Marv echo their boss' every pronouncement in a beautiful three-beat ping-pong of yes-manning—
"Max Wolfe is a pissant and the Saturn Theatre's got to go."
"Disappear."
"Evaporate."
"Personally, I like Max—"
"Nice guy."
"Sweetheart."
"—but I've got a business to run—"
"Major industry."
"An empire."
"—and Max Wolfe stands in the way of progress—"
"Obstinate."
"Pigheaded."
"—and that's costing us money."
"Can't have that."
"Got to stop."
—until the moment of truth when there's nothing to yell but "Oh, shit!" It's like an r-strategy of humor. Statistically speaking, it can't all work and it doesn't all work and some of it never should, but the relentless ratio of gags per minute guaranteed that I spent nearly the entire hour and a half of this movie laughing, if occasionally at the meta-level that it had gone for some of its jokes at all. The blues funeral. The Jews band. The doctor played by Paul Bartel. The twenty-three seconds Jackie Joseph and Dick Miller spend onscreen as Neil and Susie's parents straight out of the squarest cartoons of the Fifties. The local dealer is an alien robot pimp hight Electric Larry and his drugs are so good, they cause special effects, like stop-motion nose candy and the Surfaris. "Hey, man," a zoned-out taxi passenger suddenly notices, "it's dark out there. What's going on?" Older than pre-Code, the cabbie snaps back, "Night!" If you are pop-culturally equipped to catch them, the industry jokes are worth the price of admission. When Auden answers the phone, his apartment is a dead ringer for the cover of Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home (1965) as inhabited by Miss Havisham. The Rainbow Telegraph tool around in a psychedelically painted bus worthy of the Electric Mayhem, or more likely the Merry Pranksters. It's a nice twist on the clown car that Nada's '57 Chrysler Windsor—spray-painted with antisocial graffiti and a vanity plate reading "GET BENT"—can fit a dozen-strong all-female cross-section of post-punk and new wave, but then the trunk springs her hardcore special guest Piggy (Lee Ving), who registers as a quite credible combination of Lux Interior and Animal; he passes the time until his solo chained to the stairs and headbutts contracts to sign them. As the one-time mop-top whom success has most definitely spoiled, Reggie Wanker has the Jagger strut down to an F.U. and an area to rival David Bowie's: Dickens' first law of nomenclature all but dictates that he should finish the night in earnest conversation with his penis, but it is much funnier and less obvious that his penis should give the best advice he's heard in years and that his wired-to-the-Keith-Moon drummer Toad (John Densmore) should be able to hear it, too. "Well, don't just sit there, give the lad a drink!"
I may harbor my suspicions as to whether Arkush's original vision for Get Crazy included talking junk, but in one respect at least it achieves the realism he was aiming for: it is a damn fine concert movie. It doesn't hurt that the cast is stocked with ringers right down to a couple of band members I only spotted in the credits, but the energized cinematography by Thomas Del Ruth and the high-octane performances do more than any page of exposition to sell the cherished institution of the Saturn and the tragedy if Colin Beverly got to plant a high-rise on the property instead. It is almost certainly part of the joke that King Blues lays claim to "The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll" and "Hoochie Coochie Man," but Henderson puts the first over as if he really did write it and the second becomes a running gag/commentary on the roots of rock and roll as it recurs in subsequent acts, first rabidly thrashed-up by Piggy and Nada, later covered with glam indulgence by Reggie Wanker. Nada's "You Can't Make Me" and "I'm Not Going to Take It No More" are deliciously belligerent blasts of proto-riot grrrl, full of synth and sax and no time for men who don't stay on their side of the line. Ain't no if's, and's, or maybe's—I don't ride shotgun, baby. She knocks out the same stage crasher twice and he thanks her for it both times. Not professionally a singer, McDowell achieves the near-impossible and convinces as a "rock and roll fantasy" who may have had his head up his ego for the last twenty years and still sweats charisma as he swaggers through his signature anthem "Hot Shot" before crumpling into its heartbroken reprise. Even Auden, after blowing the whole day and $11,864.90 on a free-associating taxi odyssey, arrives just in time to close the film with a spellbindingly quiet and sincere rendition of "Little Sister." The show's over, the theater's trashed, and there's no one left in the audience but Susie Allan, but she snuck out just to see him and in perhaps the one moment in the movie where it takes its tongue out of its cheek, he sings just for her. Plus the sentient joint and the German shepherd in the balcony. What can I tell you? If you have ever attended an exhilarating, exhausting, once-in-a-lifetime concert, Get Crazy will reproduce something of that experience for you; something of the experience of working one, too. When Neil entered the men's room in hip waders, waving off clouds of reefer and narrowly avoiding the shark-fin cutting through the knee-deep ammoniac flood, I took it as a sign of authenticity that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch, veteran of countless live shows at the Somerville Theatre, convulsed beside me in recognition.
I havealexxkay to thank for making me aware of this treasure of cinema gonzo, both times in context of Robert Picardo; I deeply resent that I have never seen it from the balcony of one of our local art houses. I don't even know what it would pair well with—The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence (1975)? In fairness to our local art houses, Get Crazy has been famously scarce since its hamstrung initial release, but Kino Lorber claims to be coming out with a restoration this year and if so my money is theirs, because some movies are too weird to let get away. Till then, we'll always have not too dreadfully pixellated YouTube. The title song, I feel it should not come as a surprise, is by Sparks. This shot brought to you by my hot backers at Patreon.
Inspired by and dedicated to the director's four years with the Fillmore East, Get Crazy opens scant hours from New Year's Eve, 1982. It's the fifteenth anniversary of the Saturn Theatre (the Wiltern Theatre, effectively playing the Fillmore) and in honor of the occasion, its owner Max Wolfe (Allen Goorwitz), a mensch, a schlub, and an impresario of the old school, is planning to ring in 1983 with "the greatest concert in the history of this city . . . the biggest concert in the history of the world—the country—the universe!" Eyerolls from his employees notwithstanding, he's pulled together a lineup to showcase the history of the Saturn from its Delta blues, acid-folk origins to its latter days of art rock and glam. Old-timers can wave their lighters to the legendary stylings of King Blues (Bill Henderson), a man of such profound cool that he can close out a colleague's funeral with the heartfelt address to the heavens, "God, this is my man, and you better take care of him or I'm going to wax your ass." Young punks can mosh their hearts out to bubblegum nihilist Nada (Lori Eastside), whose cheerleader stunts share stage time with a roundhouse like a mule and a fanbase that's here for it. Everyone screams for Reggie Wanker (Malcolm McDowell), his quintessential rock godhood equally jaded with his aristocratic girlfriend, his private jet, and his ice buckets full of coke. And colder hearts than Max's would melt at the return of Captain Cloud (Howard Kaylan) and the Rainbow Telegraph, a flower-power commune just now fulfilling their booking for New Year's Eve, 1969. "Time's a trip, man," the Captain shrugs apologetically. With a little help from an apparent heart attack, Max has even secured the participation of Auden (Lou Reed), a reclusive folkie sensation of undiminished mystique and questionable attention span. Charged with making this chaos run on time are the indefatigable, occasionally Class B-fueled staff of the Saturn—smart-mouthed, fantasy-prone stage manager Neil Allan (Daniel Stern), eternally unimpressed light op Violetta (Mary Woronov), sound tech and aspiring drummer Arthur (Tim Jones), stagehand and despairing virgin Joey (Dan Frischman), and the lucky drop-in of Willy Loman (Gail Edwards), the former stage manager whom Max still praises as "the best . . . in the business" even when she swears she's out of it for good this time. Determined to bring this chaos to an explosive halt are the forces of gentrification personified by Colin Beverly (Ed Begley Jr.), a celebrity promoter all smarm and sociopathy who never goes anywhere without his matched set of sycophants Mark and Marv (Bobby Sherman and Fabian Forte) and presently the additional toadying of Sammy Fox (Miles Chapin), Max's greed-is-good putz of a nephew. "This building is going down and eighty-eight stories are going up!" Beverly snaps, tossing his Warhol-blond mane at Max like a flag before a hypertensive bull. "So fuck you and fuck rock and roll!" The gauntlet is down. The lines are around the block. A martinet of a new fire inspector (Robert Picardo), a kid sister desperate to see her idol in person (Stacey Nelkin), a biker gang, a ticking bomb, and a briefcase full of the best drugs this side of Sagittarius A* (the visual artistry of Robert Blalack) can't complicate the situation further, can they? Watch and learn.
It is not difficult to imagine a more conventionally human comedy constructed from these premises and indeed Arkush claims he originally intended to make one before finding himself unwittingly Springtime for Hitler'd by producers who wanted a flop to make bank off. I regret to inform him that however ambivalently he may regard his Tashlin-esque translation of the screenplay written by Danny Opatoshu, Henry Rosenbaum, and David Taylor, I love it. You thought Mel Brooks could pack the gags in with a tamping iron? Get Crazy makes Spaceballs (1987) look like the Lubitsch touch. Screwball chases satire trips over slapstick cannons into surrealism. Open a scene with anti-humor and it might well end in Old Comedy. Just so the silent era doesn't feel left out of the double-talk, the action is studded with subtitles: "Boy meets Girl." "The Bad Guys." "Speaking of funerals . . ." "SHOWTIME!!" I'm not even sure this film has set-ups so much as payoffs with unlimited budget. "No alcohol, no drugs, no firearms allowed," the door staff chant as six-packs and homemade stills pile up alongside a small arsenal of confiscated armaments including an aerial bomb while a seven-foot-tall sentient joint is waved on through with his Rasta friends. "One itsy-bitsy open flame in here tonight," the fire inspector tersely warns Neil, "and it's your funeral," so naturally the firebug's sea of matches that greets the opening number is as nothing to the later encouragements of a flamethrower, a fiery cross, a self-immolation, and the half-burnt sentient joint fleeing the fire inspector's wrath shrieking, "Help! Help! He's trying to bring me down!" Stage diving leads to balcony diving leads to a panel of Olympic judges holding up score cards as bodies catapult into the audience. Reggie Wanker in a heap of groupies in his hotel room is barely a joke, but Reggie Wanker gaspingly extricating himself from a solid interlock of groupies like a defututus Jenga block is sex comedy genius. Mark and Marv echo their boss' every pronouncement in a beautiful three-beat ping-pong of yes-manning—
"Max Wolfe is a pissant and the Saturn Theatre's got to go."
"Disappear."
"Evaporate."
"Personally, I like Max—"
"Nice guy."
"Sweetheart."
"—but I've got a business to run—"
"Major industry."
"An empire."
"—and Max Wolfe stands in the way of progress—"
"Obstinate."
"Pigheaded."
"—and that's costing us money."
"Can't have that."
"Got to stop."
—until the moment of truth when there's nothing to yell but "Oh, shit!" It's like an r-strategy of humor. Statistically speaking, it can't all work and it doesn't all work and some of it never should, but the relentless ratio of gags per minute guaranteed that I spent nearly the entire hour and a half of this movie laughing, if occasionally at the meta-level that it had gone for some of its jokes at all. The blues funeral. The Jews band. The doctor played by Paul Bartel. The twenty-three seconds Jackie Joseph and Dick Miller spend onscreen as Neil and Susie's parents straight out of the squarest cartoons of the Fifties. The local dealer is an alien robot pimp hight Electric Larry and his drugs are so good, they cause special effects, like stop-motion nose candy and the Surfaris. "Hey, man," a zoned-out taxi passenger suddenly notices, "it's dark out there. What's going on?" Older than pre-Code, the cabbie snaps back, "Night!" If you are pop-culturally equipped to catch them, the industry jokes are worth the price of admission. When Auden answers the phone, his apartment is a dead ringer for the cover of Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home (1965) as inhabited by Miss Havisham. The Rainbow Telegraph tool around in a psychedelically painted bus worthy of the Electric Mayhem, or more likely the Merry Pranksters. It's a nice twist on the clown car that Nada's '57 Chrysler Windsor—spray-painted with antisocial graffiti and a vanity plate reading "GET BENT"—can fit a dozen-strong all-female cross-section of post-punk and new wave, but then the trunk springs her hardcore special guest Piggy (Lee Ving), who registers as a quite credible combination of Lux Interior and Animal; he passes the time until his solo chained to the stairs and headbutts contracts to sign them. As the one-time mop-top whom success has most definitely spoiled, Reggie Wanker has the Jagger strut down to an F.U. and an area to rival David Bowie's: Dickens' first law of nomenclature all but dictates that he should finish the night in earnest conversation with his penis, but it is much funnier and less obvious that his penis should give the best advice he's heard in years and that his wired-to-the-Keith-Moon drummer Toad (John Densmore) should be able to hear it, too. "Well, don't just sit there, give the lad a drink!"
I may harbor my suspicions as to whether Arkush's original vision for Get Crazy included talking junk, but in one respect at least it achieves the realism he was aiming for: it is a damn fine concert movie. It doesn't hurt that the cast is stocked with ringers right down to a couple of band members I only spotted in the credits, but the energized cinematography by Thomas Del Ruth and the high-octane performances do more than any page of exposition to sell the cherished institution of the Saturn and the tragedy if Colin Beverly got to plant a high-rise on the property instead. It is almost certainly part of the joke that King Blues lays claim to "The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll" and "Hoochie Coochie Man," but Henderson puts the first over as if he really did write it and the second becomes a running gag/commentary on the roots of rock and roll as it recurs in subsequent acts, first rabidly thrashed-up by Piggy and Nada, later covered with glam indulgence by Reggie Wanker. Nada's "You Can't Make Me" and "I'm Not Going to Take It No More" are deliciously belligerent blasts of proto-riot grrrl, full of synth and sax and no time for men who don't stay on their side of the line. Ain't no if's, and's, or maybe's—I don't ride shotgun, baby. She knocks out the same stage crasher twice and he thanks her for it both times. Not professionally a singer, McDowell achieves the near-impossible and convinces as a "rock and roll fantasy" who may have had his head up his ego for the last twenty years and still sweats charisma as he swaggers through his signature anthem "Hot Shot" before crumpling into its heartbroken reprise. Even Auden, after blowing the whole day and $11,864.90 on a free-associating taxi odyssey, arrives just in time to close the film with a spellbindingly quiet and sincere rendition of "Little Sister." The show's over, the theater's trashed, and there's no one left in the audience but Susie Allan, but she snuck out just to see him and in perhaps the one moment in the movie where it takes its tongue out of its cheek, he sings just for her. Plus the sentient joint and the German shepherd in the balcony. What can I tell you? If you have ever attended an exhilarating, exhausting, once-in-a-lifetime concert, Get Crazy will reproduce something of that experience for you; something of the experience of working one, too. When Neil entered the men's room in hip waders, waving off clouds of reefer and narrowly avoiding the shark-fin cutting through the knee-deep ammoniac flood, I took it as a sign of authenticity that
spatch, veteran of countless live shows at the Somerville Theatre, convulsed beside me in recognition.I have
alexxkay to thank for making me aware of this treasure of cinema gonzo, both times in context of Robert Picardo; I deeply resent that I have never seen it from the balcony of one of our local art houses. I don't even know what it would pair well with—The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence (1975)? In fairness to our local art houses, Get Crazy has been famously scarce since its hamstrung initial release, but Kino Lorber claims to be coming out with a restoration this year and if so my money is theirs, because some movies are too weird to let get away. Till then, we'll always have not too dreadfully pixellated YouTube. The title song, I feel it should not come as a surprise, is by Sparks. This shot brought to you by my hot backers at Patreon.
