Caged Heat, CinemaTexas, and the Drive-In: Austin, Texas - Fall 1977

     There are two guys in a car watching an exploitation movie at a drive-in in South Austin. They don't know each other that well; the driver is one of a group of friends - close since high school in Dallas, Texas - all in love with movies. The other is a graduate student, new to the University of Texas, Radio-Television-Film Dept. where some of this group has settled. At the very end of the movie both are leaning out the car's windows, banging on the roof, cheering, unable to believe what they've just seen, Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat. Before the week is out they're back, this time in a caravan of cars filled with graduate film students and at least one professor to see it again.
     A 1974 women in prison exploitation film, Caged Heat was released (and partially financed) by Roger Corman's New World Pictures, shot by Tak Fujimoto, scored by John Cale and starring Erica Gavin, Juanita Brown, Roberta Collins, Rainbeaux Smith, and Barabra Steele among others. It was my first exposure to a New World Pictures release and modern women in prison effort (post Jack Hill's The Big Doll House in 1971). In many ways it was a film I had long carried in my head without knowing it. A political action film, a feminist and exploitive, Howard Hawks and the Western meet French New Wave and Brazilian cinema novo by way of B movies, American drive-in fare and, of course, rock 'n roll (no accident that ex-Velvet Underground John Cale did the score).
     The story has to begin there. A lot of things lead to that moment, almost everything that happens in my life afterwards has some root in that night.
     Brian Mitchell and I, leaning into the night cheering, as the women break out of prison and the guards can't stop them. Every shot fired by a guard misses; every shot by the women connects. The women race to the getaway car, the shooting continues. A guard loses an ear. The women get into the car. Then, just before the end, a perfect freeze frame of a hand on the door. The door slams shut and they drive off - into the rest of my life.

     The beginning, the context has many moments. Watching Lost Horizon at my grandmother's house when I was nine or ten and being taken by a family friend to see Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator during an early 60s revival. Being befriended by Len Maltin in Junior High School who not only ushered me to hundreds of movies but dragged me to meet Buster Keaton under the Brooklyn Bridge when we were 13. Having John Grigg's (a character actor mostly working in Soaps, whose best known role was as Ralph's boss on "The Honeymooners") show us classics in his cellar theater. Mostly he showed silents like Birth of a Nation, Intolerance and Lorna Doone accompanied by specially prepared taped organ scores while he placed colored filters over the lens at appropriate moments (red for battle scenes, green for forests etc.). He also screened such great sound films as 1939's Four Feathers. Watching Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player the first week of college or Jean Luc Godard's Alphaville some time later. Walking out of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch during the first week it opened in NYC to find Time Square, after the movie, seeming eerily quiet and still. Going to view Mark Lester's Truck Stop Women in Boston so I can hate film critic Stuart Byron (who recommended it), only to like the film. Moving to Austin in the summer of 1976 to be an English graduate student at UT. Breaking up with my girlfriend, hating English, visiting Maltin correspondent Dr. George Wead -- that brought me into the film dept. Which lead to CinemaTexas, which lead to that night in the drive-in.

     In the following years I watched every Demme movie many times as well as seeing most of New World's releases, the films of its alumni, Roger Corman's output, and untold numbers of other exploitation/drive-in movies. Besides watching movies, I helped start the weekly Austin Chronicle in 1981 (currently I'm editor), was a founding board member of the Austin Film Society, appeared in Slacker and helped start South by Southwest in 1987 (I'm a Director). My next major project, the one I've been thinking about since that night, is writing about Jonathan Demme. This piece is mostly a catalog of our relationship, the first notes towards a more substantive work.

 
Becoming Demme Fans: 1977

     In the summer of 1977 I decided, after a year at it, that being an English graduate student at the Univ. of Texas was less than inspiring. Luckily, earlier in the year I had gone over to the R-T-F Dept. and introduced myself to Prof. George Wead. Wead authored a study of Buster Keaton, which had lead to an ongoing correspondence with Len Maltin, my childhood friend. Len had suggested I visit, whereas ordinarily I would have been too shy, this time I took him up. Wead and I hit it off immediately. Some time later he asked if I'd be interested in transferring to film. Studying film at college didn't seem totally legitimate to me so I declined. Months later, my long time relation having gone down in flames and English continuing to prove stupefying, I changed my mind.
     One of the strengths of the R-T-F Dept. was CinemaTexas (CT), a graduate student run film society that programmed films to complement the courses being offered during a semester (this before video was consumer accessible). If there was a Western course than every Wednesday would be a Western, Film Noir, French New Wave, Italian Neo Realism and so on, whatever was being taught, would get its own night (Mon. through Thurs.). Tuesday was always the history of film, from Birth of a Nation or Intolerance through Citizen Kane passed Breathless or Shoot The Piano Player to more current films - titles would change, directors represented as well but the industry highlights would be illuminated by the programmed films. Graduate students wrote notes to accompany each film which were mimeographed and distributed at the screenings. CT had two rooms; one the office for ordering films, editing notes and meeting, the other a screening room where the mimeograph machine was housed. In that one was a 16mm projector for showing films against the wall, and, best of all, a two-plate flatbed Steenbeck editing machine for more careful viewing and analysis. On it, you could watch the film frame-by-frame, as well as go backwards and forward with ease.
     Slowly, somewhat shyly, even before joining the Dept. I had begun to hang out there. Over time I was becoming more involved both socially and academically. After officially joining the Dept. in the fall of 1977, I began writing program notes. The first films I wrote on were Frank Capra's Meet John Doe (Oct. 24 1977), Roger Corman's Masque of the Red Death (Nov., 1 1977), Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (Nov. 9, 1977) and contributed to the set on Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Dec. 7, 1977).
     Early that fall, while still not completely comfortable at CT, I was stopping by one day when Ed Lowry, the Director, suggested that there was a movie playing at the Drive-in that night that I might enjoy. I ended up going with Brian Mitchell, a friend of Ed's.
     In Boston, where I had lived right before moving to Austin, I had really come to hate Stuart Byron, a film critic at one of Boston's weeklies. He treated low budget releases, gay films, pornography, edgy foreign films and the like with the same regard as mainstream works. He loved Fassbinder, for example, whom sounded a little too outside to me, as well as seriously reviewing drive-in exploitation films. Every week, when I picked up the paper, his reviews were the first thing I read, marveling at his stupidity and cherishing my superior taste. In order to hate him more precisely I decided to start going to see the movies he liked. Porn was out and Fassbinder didn't sound like my cup of tea so I tackled the exploitation releases. Over the course of months I saw maybe a half dozen (not one classic), surprisingly they were pretty much fun. In particular, I was looking forward to Mark Lester's Truck Stop Women both from the review and the title. The movie was amusing but disappointing both in that it was more interesting and fun than I was hoping but less transcendent than seemed possible.
     So, by the time we headed to the drive-in in South Austin, I was more receptive to these films than I would have otherwise been. We arrived at the drive-in during the middle of the first movie. After it was over, Caged Heat directed by Jonathan Demme began. The opening was startling and we were with the film all the way. The ending knocked us out. We watched the first half of the other movie and left ecstatic.
     The next day I told Ed that I couldn't believe he was so subdued about such a great movie. He acknowledged his enthusiastic affection for it but offered that he didn't know my tastes or me well enough to really rave. Within the next few days a group of us returned to the drive-in to watch it again. The film more than held up, I caught a richness I had missed the first time, in performances, plot, music, camera work and editing (from archaic wipes to dramatic cuts).
     I was raving, I was a lunatic. With my romantic relationship devastated, Caged Heat became my new love, so much of my passion channeled to exploitation films, with New World Pictures and its directors my favorites, especially Jonathan Demme. Nick Barbaro, another CT graduate student, and I had a roaring bitter fight over what Caged Heat would mean to the audience most likely to see it. Barbaro resisted my interpretation of the film as, at least in some ways, a leftist, feminist work. He also argued that the other film on the bill was pretty great too. I couldn't believe it. How could he say that? I ranted and raved at him. How could he dare to seriously discuss that film in the same breath as Caged Heat? It was David Cronenberg's Rabid. Later I came to love Cronenberg, while Barbaro and I now have been business partners for over 20 years.
     This was a new chapter in my life. Going from the contempt I'd had for Byron's egalitarian tastes I spent the next several years writing about and teaching B movies, drive-in/exploitation and any kind of low budget film. One of the great revelations of that year, besides Caged Heat, was watching Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends, which is one of the truly great movies.

 
Searching For Demme, Seeking His Films: 1977 - 1980

     We began to dig for any information we could find about Demme. In the days before the web this kind of research was scattershot at best. I don't even remember how we found what we found, though there was Take One, a Canadian film magazine that followed exploitation films, Bright Lights, a California based film magazine that did as well and writer Michael Goodwin who covered them for a number of publications. In April 1978 CinemaTexas brought Caged Heat and I discovered how difficult it was to write on a movie I really loved. We found that Demme had directed three other movies: Crazy Mama (1975), Fighting Mad (1976) and Citizens Band (aka Handle With Care, 1977). At some point, as part of CT's much more limited summer programming we brought Crazy Mama, just to see it. The film drove us just as nuts as Caged Heat, both vibrant unapologetic celebrations of American culture (in Dec. 1981 CT scheduled it again in conjunction with a class as part of the regular program, I wrote the notes).
     Ed Lowry and I caught Citizens Band at a drive-in in Dallas on a double bill with American Hot Wax, probably sometime in late '78 or '79. It was a great night fueled by a bottle of rum and a couple of bottles of Coca Cola. We were especially pleased when after Hot Wax the driver of the truck parked ahead of us could be heard exhorting his young son about Jerry Lee Lewis, "That was the Killer, he is the Killer!" Citizens Band wowed us, we watched it twice, thrilled at just how rich a loving humanist comedy it was. With neither embarrassment nor pretension, we discussed how, outside of Jean Renoir, there were precious few directors with such love for their characters and, by extension, humanity.
     I don't remember where or how we finally caught Fighting Mad. In the era pre video/DVD when there was also very limited cable access, tracking down a film you wanted to see was a kind of detective work, involving time, devotion, and knowledge. In light of the energy we invested in finally seeing it, given our expectations heightened by Caged Heat, Crazy Mama, and Citizens Band, Fighting Mad proved to be disappointing. Which in no way lessened our enthusiasm for the director.
     By this time my fascination with exploitation films in general as well as Jonathan Demme, Roger Corman, and New World in particular had developed into full blown obsession. Wherever I traveled, upon arriving in a new city, the first thing I did was check the paper to see what was at the drive-in, the inner city triple bill theaters, and on television. The idea was to see everything - absolutely everything, without distinction or regard for quality. This included Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha, Francis Ford Coppola's Dementia 13, and Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000, as well as every film by Jonathan Kaplan, Stephanie Rothman, Steve Carver and Jack Hill and non-New World directors like George Romero, Russ Meyer, Wes Craven, and Herschell Gordon Lewis. Included were the complete filmographies of Cover Girl Models director Cirio Santiago and Summer School Teachers' Barbara Peeters, as well as Ray Steckler, Ted V. Mikels, Melvin Van Peebles, Arthur Marks, and Karen Arthur. There were no limits, Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S., I Spit on Your Grave, and Bloodsucking Freaks, right alongside every work by Larry Buchanan, and Doris Wishman and on, and on to any film that might even be vaguely considered in the category. It was a heady time of twisted discovery and cinematic adventure. But the center of my passion was Jonathan Demme.
     Seeing The Big Doll House, The Hot Box, The Big Bird Cage and Black Mama, White Mama (my favorite of those films) brought the realization that some of what knocked me out in Caged Heat were generic mainstays of the Women in Prison films rather than innovations. Demme, of course, helped formulate these as a producer, writer and second unit director on The Hot Box and author of the story for Black Mama, White Mama (a perfect Demme-esque take on The Defiant Ones). Even in this context, however, the women prisoners/characters in Caged Heat were far stronger, more independent and deeply loyal than in the other movies, marking it as more political but still passionate, ironic yet heartfelt than I had realized.
     NOTE: In John Sayles' Lone Star the film at the drive-in is Black Mama, White Mama. The first scout for that film began with Sayles and Maggie Renzi, his producer and companion (I met them through Demme years before) staying in our garage apartment where a framed lobby card from the movie was prominently displayed.

 
Meeting Demme for the First Time: The Venice Film Festival

     Somewhere in here fellow R-T-F graduate student and CinemaTexas writer Nick Barbaro was at the Venice Film Festival when Melvin and Howard was shown. When Demme came to town to show Citizens Band as part of the Independent Images Conference several years later, Nick wrote about this:

"The first time I met Jonathan Demme was at the Venice Film Festival, where he was presenting Melvin and Howard and I was hanging around, seeing movies on press credentials I had obtained under only mildly false pretenses.

"Demme's press conference wasn't a really hot item. European film critics didn't know what to make of a director with an arty reputation and credits like The Hot Box, Caged Heat, Crazy Mama and Black Mama, White Mama, so I got to ask a few questions and later, I introduced myself in the lobby. The first thing he said when I told him I was from Austin was, "Austin, huh? Ever go to Raul's?" [Raul's was Austin's punk/new wave club] Turns out someone sent him the Raul's compilation album and some other stuff and he's been a big fan of the Austin music scene for a while now.

"So we talked for a while about Standing Waves and Terminal Mind, Joe 'King' Carrasco and the Huns [well known Austin bands at the time], standing in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel on the Lido, then we retired to the lounge and he and producer Don Phillips buy me drinks while they speculate on what kind of response they're going to get here. 'In America, they're always telling us that our movie's too esoteric to be commercial,' someone says. 'Today someone told me he didn't think they'd get it here, said the movie's too American.' "

-Nick Barbaro, The Austin Chronicle<, October 1985

 
AN INTERLUDE: First Interview

     What follows is a phone interview we did with Jonathan Demme. I think this was before he came to Texas for the first time but maybe not. Nick Barbaro, Ed Lowry and I are all likely participants though I don't remember exactly who. Part of the interview was published in the CinemaTexas program notes for Crazy Mama (1975) screened Dec. 8, 1981. Another part appeared in Images, the Monday arts supplement of The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at UT I'm uncertain of the date but it was in conjunction with Melvin and Howard opening in Austin (reviewed in a sidebar by Nick Barbaro). The photocopy I have lacks not only date but also byline. Some of the interview was used in both but I've eliminated the duplication here.

CINEMA TEXAS: When Donny Most and Linda Purl came through town promoting Leo and Loree [1980; directed by Jerry Paris], we started asking them questions about Crazy Mama, which took them aback to put it mildly.
JONATHAN DEMME: So they coiled and hurled themselves against the walls.

Actually, no; at first they looked suspicious and askance as though they thought we were going to say "Ah ha, so you've done this in your past!" But then Pam Manteer who works for CinemaTexas looked them straight in the face and said "Crazy Mama is my favorite movie." And Pam is very demure looking. It's a startling statement to come from Pam's lips, although it's true. Then several of us agreed with her. At that point they warmed up and started talking about it. But they said Corman had taken it and re-cut it or part of it.
Well, he...it's simpler than that. That was a movie that was made because Roger sold the title to several exhibitors across the country for a certain date before even having a screenplay. So by the time there was a screenplay and by the time Shirley Clarke had been fired who was supposed to direct it originally...

Shirley Clarke? [Clarke was a New York City filmmaker best known for documentaries such as Jason: Portrait of a Junkie and films that mixed narrative and documentary like The Connection and The Cool World]
Yeah, consider that for a second. I would have loved to have seen that version.

Actually, we were thinking that too.
And how! But they had a parting of the ways about ten days before they started shooting so Roger called me up and said "Okay we're not making Fighting Mad," which I was expecting to make. I had been working on the script for about a year. Instead, you're going to direct Crazy Mama in ten days. When he told me this over lunch it was a classic Roger moment. So, even as I am trying somehow to come to terms with the trauma of finding out that this Fighting Mad -- which I'm passionately dying to make -- and I'm coming to terms with the fact I'm not going to make that, he's going, "There's a casting session in half an hour, find all the locations and, by the way, the cast hates the script." I said, "Look Roger I must read the script before I agree to do this." He said, "Absolutely not enough time for that."
     The one thing I was able to do there was to say very well in that case you're going to have to let me have...because the kind of Corman movies where the second unit going on all the time and in fact the second unit director winds up doing almost as much as the director. Evelyn Purcell to whom I was married was producing. We were working very closely together so I said, if Evelyn can be second unit director, I'll do it. Corman said, "Okay, fine." And off we went and did it.

How closely did you stick to Thom's script?
Well in certain places, especially up front, very closely - there are a lot of fabulous dialogue scenes in it. Towards the end we changed it more and more. It was supposed to end in a total bloodbath with everybody getting killed, the kids, Cloris, and I just couldn't handle that, somehow or other, but I was pissed off at Ann Southern for being such an old kvetch so I let her get killed. Everybody else escaped. We had no ending. Roger said there's no ending here so I came up with the idea of tacking on the flash forward.

-Crazy Mama, CinemaTexas notes, Vol. 21, No. 3, December 8, 1981  

 
THE DAILY TEXAN: We are curious about your background. You started out making commercials?
JONATHAN DEMME: Well I didn't direct commercials, but I produced commercials for a company called P.G.O. Productions in London in the late 60s and early 70s. That is where I met Roger [Corman] when he was over there making Von Richthofen and Brown. He was just getting New World started. They needed screenplays and so he said "Do you like motorcycle movies?"
     "Yes."
     "Would you be interested in writing a script for a motorcycle movie?"
     I said, "Absolutely."
     I teamed up with my friend Joe Viola and we wrote a motorcycle version of Rashomon and gave it to Corman.
     He said "Love the rape scene, love the murder, now let's throw the rest of this stuff out."
     When Joe and I did the rewrite and finished the script Corman sat there and read it in front of us and said, "Well, why don't you guys come over and make it." The next thing we knew we were in Los Angeles making this movie.

That's Angels Hard as They Come? A real nice film.
I'm glad to hear you think so. I do too. We made that one for $125,000. It did very well. It came late in the cycle as all my movies do. So it wasn't one of the highest grossing bike flicks but it still did very well.

And you followed that with The Hot Box?
Yes. Roger sent us to the Philippines to do our nurses in bondage movie. I tell you it is a true epic. I think Joe's a really terrific director. He stopped directing after that. He decided he just wanted to write.
     But we got these extraordinary battle scenes in The Hot Box. It was hilarious because we were doing a movie the theme of which was that in many repressed third world countries revolution is the only correct solution to the current problems. Meanwhile we're cutting to the waterfall every five minutes so that the nurses can bathe nude and discuss their changing dialectics. We were using like two or three hundred members of the Filipino constabulary and Filipino army cadets, R.O.T.C. officers to portray the imperialistic army in this country. We were having them constantly blown away by a band of rebels and these generals kept coming to our hotel and saying, "Well, gee, when do we get to see the script?"
     "Oh well, it will be ready next week."
     "But we don't understand how you can shoot a film without a script."
     "Well, we're constantly changing it." Joe and I were really quite amazed that we got out of there alive because this was like in 1972 and there was a full scale revolutionary war going on right around us. We were 90 miles from Zamboanga, which was one of the great hot beds of military activity at that point. Martial law was in effect and it was a month after the infamous Plaza Miranda bombing where Marcos decided the best way to eliminate the political opposition was to blow up the entire party at a rally. And here we come arriving in town. So that was the whole bizarre experience.

After Crazy Mama you did get to make Fighting Mad. Then you directed Citizens Band, which became a critical smash. Next, you did The Last Embrace and now Melvin and Howard. All of these films have as their central concern not really their plots but people and the way they live and deal with each other.
The fact is that one of the big appeals about directing for me is that it does allow me to kind of work with the things that interest me most about life, which are people and the way they interact with each other. I'm almost obsessed by all that stuff and I really sort of tend to like people, all different types of people. I'm fascinated by the way they get on with each other or don't get on with each other.
     Scripts that appeal to me now are inevitably pieces that really get into this. Melvin and Howard is very much all about that for me. And the script Love Hurts that I'm very much hoping to do is very much all about that. It's something I don't think you see honestly explored all that much in commercial cinema. Who knows for what reasons. That's why I end up making movies that are accused of being off beat - because that is my tendency.

How do you feel about the fact that some of your films have had greater critical success than commercial success.
How does that feel? It makes me feel glad that I made movies that were seen enough to be considered very good. I'm sorry that more people didn't see them. I'm hoping, in fact, now that we are into the national release of Melvin and Howard that enough people will come to see it to earn its money back for the investors and therefore justify, in business terms, its existence.
     But I'm basically in it for the work. It's the part I like the best and, if the movie goes on to do terrific business, wonderful. But I'm not depressed about that in any way.

-The Daily Texan