Year 18, Day 311 - 11/7/26 - Movie #5,475
BEFORE: I'm going to keep moving as fast as I can on films, because I'll be busy all next week working DocFest screenings at the theater. I think the Nets will be on the road, so that's off the table, but I also need to find a third job to cover me during the holiday slow-down. The theater's going to close in Mid-December and I can't go two weeks without working, that's how I ended up managing the New Year's Eve party at Margaritaville in Times Square last year. I don't want to do that again. I could work in a holiday market or something like that, but I'm not available until after Thanksgiving, so it could be tougher to find something then.
Isabella Rossellini carries over again from "My Dog Tulip" so she should finish the year with eight appearances, which is not too shabby at all.
THE PLOT: 40-something writer and ex-con Tim Madden, who is prone to black-outs, awakens from a two-week bender to discover a pool of blood in his car and his ex's name tattooed on his arm. Also, two people close to him are dead.
AFTER: I'm writing this today from behind the scenes at the Korean-American Film Festival, another event which has rented out the theater for the day. I've come to consider myself as an event whore, I'll work at a WWE match or a WNBA game, or a Russian comedy show or a queer film festival, it doesn't matter. I don't have to believe in the importance of the event, I only need to make sure that things go well. And since my services are for sale, I'm a whore. It's OK, we're all whores at the end of the day.
I don't know much about Norman Mailer, though - I've seen him in a bunch of documentaries like "When We Were Kings", about the Muhammad Ali "Rumble in the Jungle" fight and I know he was a man's man author from the decades after World War II, he was married six times and had nine children, ran for mayor of New York once but finished fourth in the Democratic primary. He stabbed one of his wives and nearly killed her, was convicted of assault and served a three-year probation - must be nice to be a successful author and journalist. However, his career as a filmmaker was less that stellar, making him the only person to hold both a Pulitzer Prize and a Razzie award, for today's film, which is an incoherent mess.
Part of the problem is excessive flashbackery - we meet Tim Madden when he first wakes up after a two-week blackout binge and tries to put recent events in order by relating them to his father, Dougy, who has cancer and has visited him to tell him that he's stopped chemo treatments. The rest of the story is thus told in flashback, however, the flashbacks also contain flashbacks within them to explain some points, making it ultimately impossible to tell the order of everything that has transpired before. And Tim's had a number of sexual partners, and they've all had a number of other partners, so there's a lot of cheating and jealousy to go around. Well, it was the 1970's, the era of free love, so I suppose this sort of thing was bound to happen.
This is set in Provincetown, MA which is on the tip of Cape Cod and now has a reputation as a gay mecca. Mailer also had a house there, I'm wondering how such a man's man felt about his town turning into such a destination, since his characters talk about "faggots" and closeted gay men are forced to watch their unsatisfied wives having sex with other men. Umm, if they're gay, why did they get married? I don't think Mailer quite understood the whole concept. It was a different time, and maybe society types had to get married for social reasons, but then it's a bit unclear, do they love their wives or not? If they're gay and having sex with men, why is watching their wives have sex with other men such a torture? Like everything about this film, it's all very confusing. Tim is also an ex-con and it's suggested that he probably had gay prison sex at one point, and possibly also prep-school sex with his old friend and rival, Wardley.
We've also got this weird love rectangle (or hexagon, or octagon or something) where Tim's ex-girlfriend, Madeleine, is married to the town police chief, Alvin Luther Regency. Regency is having an affair with Patty Laraine, who is Tim's current (?) wife. This leads to the now infamous sequence where Madeleine says "I think my husband is having an affair with your wife" and Tim reacts with "Oh, Man! Oh, God!" while the camera spins around him and this has now become a meme in the age of the internet & social media. "Family Guy" did a riff on it where they repeated that line about 20 times, to the point of ridiculousness.
To make things more complicated, after Tim first got together with Madeleine, things were great, until he saw an ad in a Screw magazine from swingers down in a southern state and they drove down there so Tim could have sex with Patty and Madeleine could have sex with Big Stoop, who was also a preacher played by Penn Jillette. This is where Patty devised her ultimate scheme, to ditch her current husband, hook up with a wealthy man somewhere else, divorce him and then come and find Tim again in Provincetown once she had money so she could support him while he becomes a novelist. One has to wonder if this is also Norman Mailer's origin story, to some degree. On the way home from the Deep South, Tim and Madeleine argued because he apparently enjoyed sex with Patty a bit too much, and also they could hear Madeleine having sex with Big Stoop, and now she's embarrassed about it. The car crashes and Madeleine is rendered infertile by the crash somehow.
Well, that rich guy that Patty found turned out to be Wardley, Tim's old prep-school friend (and ex-lover and rival, it seems) and Patty got Wardley to hire Tim as her chauffeur and then left Wardley for Tim. Later Patty got Tim to hire Bolo as her new chauffeur and then left Tim for Bolo, so let's say she's got a pattern, or the writer was too lazy to come up with a new break-up idea.
Patty still has Wardley in her schemes, though, she lured him back with promises of becoming a cocaine dealer, also looping in porn star Jessica Pond and her cuckolded husband (?), Lonnie Pangborn. Tim notably had sex with Jessica while Lonnie watched, disappointed - only not enough to stop them or complain about it, which means he was kind of into it (?). Again, it's the 1970's and sex is open, available and then potentially fairly complicated. However it turns out that there's NO cocaine at all, but now Patty wants $10 million from Wardley as blackmail money, instead of drug money. This is all way more complicated than it needs to be, also I'm not really sure if I have these events in the right order, because the movie jumps around so much in time.
So yeah, there's a fake cocaine deal, affairs with porn stars, a lot of sexual swinging, and then a plan to frame Tim for murder. That's about as 1970's as you can get, I think, or else this is all just stuff that Norman Mailer knows about first-hand, I'm not sure. The police chief turns out to be at the center of everything, he's got a split personality and if anybody killed two people and left their heads in Tim's marijuana hiding place, it was probably him. Umm, I think - or it was Tim who killed two people while he was blackout drunk, who can say for sure? We see Tim finding just somebody's head, and then later we see the same thing happen again, only this time there are TWO heads. I can't tell if this was an editing mistake or just a remarkable coincidence. Or again, just some weird stuff that happened to Norman Mailer.
But really this film manages to pinpoint a very specific moment in time, as the 1970's were drawing to a close and the 1980's were on deck. So sure, a pot dealer might have ambitions to become a cocaine dealer, and we all had to transition from films that made no sense because the director was high on grass to films that made no sense because the director was high on cocaine. Yes, there's a difference. And it was a time when if your life got too complicated with too many sex partners, the only thing you could do was kill a couple of them and hide the bodies and heads in different places. Later this film would be turned into the Guns 'N Roses song with the line "I used to love her, but I had to kill her." During the 1980's, this practice became a lot less socially acceptable, also a lot of people just stopped having casual sex because of AIDS, which I guess then also had the effect of lowering the murder rate.
Once the half-gay rich guy has learned that there was no actual cocaine in the coke deal he kills himself, and once the corrupt police chief learns that the woman he loves (not his wife, or the porn star, I mean Tim's current wife, Patty) is dead, he has a stroke, and then gets shot by his current wife, that means that Tim and Madeleine can get back together - well, they kind of are the only two people left standing and above ground. Madeleine finds $2 million stashed by her now-dead husband, and she buys a house for her and Tim so he can become a famous novelist. Again, this may just all be a distorted version of the Norman Mailer origin story, for all we know. I guess all's well that ends well until somebody discovers the beach full of buried bodies and the inlet full of drowned heads.
NITPICK POINT: It's kind of hard to forget getting a tattoo, no matter how drunk you are. Don't they hurt quite a bit?
Directed by Norman Mailer (last seen in "Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes")
Also starring Ryan O'Neal (last seen in "Film Geek"), Debra Stipe (aka Debra Sandlund) (last seen in "Father Figures"), Wings Hauser (last seen in "The Siege of Firebase Gloria"), John Bedford Lloyd (last seen in "No Pay, Nudity"), Lawrence Tierney (last seen in "2 Days in the Valley"), Penn Jillette (last seen in "Marty Supreme"), Frances Fisher (last seen in "Reptile"), R. Patrick Sullivan (last seen in "She-Devil"), John Snyder (last seen in "Eraser"), Stephan Morrow, Clarence Williams III (last seen in "Hoodlum"), Kathryn Sanders, Ira Lewis, Ed Setrakian (last seen in "The Hard Way"), Jodi Faith Cahn, Edward Bonetti, Joel Meyerowitz, Gregory Hodal, Katrina Marshall, and the voices of Sally Moffet, Carol Stevens.
RATING: 4 out of 10 sleazy guys named Spider or Stoodie who hang out at the garage
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