Last week, Hadrian, Bret, Suki and Cinefamily friend John Wyatt (of Cinespia) were invited by the daughter of the late John Rad (director of “Dangerous Men”) to Rad’s final residence in Chatsworth, CA, in order to gather the leftover contents of the house and storage shed. Was it an easy job? What treasures were found? Possibly a film print of the rumored “lost” John Rad film? Check out the photo album on Facebook to find out! Below are a few examples…
- bret
GERALD BUSBY – “3 Women” soundtrack (1977)
“Gerald Busby’s music for ‘3 Women’ is so perfect I don’t know how to talk about it.” — Robert Altman
I’ve been waiting for years for an official soundtrack release to Gerald Busby’s overwhelmingly creepy score to Robert Altman’s 3 Women
In a dusty, under-populated California resort town, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), a naïve and impressionable Southern waif begins her life as a nursing home attendant. There, Pinky finds her role model in fellow nurse “Thoroughly Modern” Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall), a misguided would-be sophisticate and hopeless devotee of Cosmopolitan and Woman’s Day magazines. When Millie accepts Pinky into her home at the Purple Sage singles complex, Pinky’s hero-worship evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have anticipated. Featuring brilliant performances from Spacek and Duvall, Robert Altman’s dreamlike masterpiece, 3 Women, careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s.
It’s one of Altman’s very best, and Duvall gives perhaps her greatest screen performance as Millie, a sharply realized and truly original character who radiates both pathos and cock-eyed charisma.
Busby’s score is the perfect complement to the hazy, mysterious mood Altman sets up, as the score is, full of mournful woodwinds, piercing flute and pulsating low rumbles of bass strings. The film tanked miserably at the box office (due in part, no doubt, to its difficult-to-parse marketing campaign, or lack thereof), and in fact an unexpected film from the lower rungs of the Fox ‘77 release schedule completely overshadowed it and many others: Star Wars.
This download is an audio rip from the Criterion Collection DVD of “3 Women”, and since there was no isolated score track, this “soundtrack” features all of the music cues as they appear in the film, in addition to some dialogue and sound effects.
Gerald Busby – “3 Women” soundtrack (ZIP file)
Robert Altman DVDs on Amazon.com
- bret
We here at the Cinefamily have always been fans of “bumpers”, those magical graphics and theme songs that make up station identifications or are promos for upcoming programs. Quite a few of us in the office were babysat by cable TV in our childhoods, and so almost nothing else gives us that warm ‘n fuzzy feeling like the sights and sounds — of early HBO.
HBO In Space (”Feature Presentation”): This is the “floating in space thing” that HBO would show before almost every single feature, between 1983 and the late ’80s. There were three versions: the 60-second flying-through-the-cityscape-and-then-onto-the-floating-logo version, the 30-second space-only version, and the 70-second one that was a mirror of the 60-second one, only with a short scene of a family turning on the TV and sitting down tacked onto the beginning. The 30-second one is the one they showed most often, but here’s the audio for the 60-second version.
“HBO In Space” feature presentation bumper music (MP3)
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HBO Movie bumper, late 1980s: This one’s got more plastic pomp, what with the neon glow and the shredding guitar solo. This one got heavy play up until sometime in the mid-’90s. A cinephile friend of mine instantly recognized what this was by name, after only hearing the first few seconds of it from across the room.
“HBO Movie” feature presentation bumper music, late 1980s (MP3)
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HBO Movie Marquee & Coming Up Next On HBO, early 1980s: These go back a little further than my cable-watching career allowed. My family got cable in the household in ‘83, around the time the “HBO In Space” thing premiered.
“HBO Movie Marquee” feature presentation bumper music, early 1980s (MP3)
“Coming Up Next On HBO” bumper, early 1980s (MP3)
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The Best Time On TV Is HBO, late 1980s(?): Some HBO executive must’ve loved the work of painter Piet Mondrian
“The Best Time On TV Is HBO” promo, late 1980s (MP3)
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HBO Video Jukebox, 1981-1986: Wikipedia sez:
“A typical episode of ‘Video Jukebox’ consisted of seven or eight music videos and lasted roughly 30 minutes, and the lineup changed in the middle of each month…[i]n the late 1970s (and before the MTV network debuted), HBO was already airing one or two music videos (or ‘promotional clips’ as they were known at the time) as filler in between their feature films and other series. These short clips also carried the ‘Video Jukebox’ moniker. When Video Jukebox premiered as a half-hour series in December 1981, HBO reached more households than MTV (which was launched only four months earlier), so a video that aired on Video Jukebox actually received more exposure than it would on MTV, a claim that would be short-lived as MTV quickly gained more cable markets…[a]t the peak of its popularity in the mid-1980s, Video Jukebox spawned many ’special edition’, including Christmas Jukebox, Country Jukebox, Comedy Jukebox and other editions featuring songs from movies and Grammy winners.”
Here’s the brief theme music from both versions of the show’s opening credits through its five-year run.
“HBO Video Jukebox” themes, 1981-1986 (MP3)
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No Place Like HBO commercial, early 1980s: I don’t know if this saccharine jingle was something that only aired on HBO itself, or on network TV at the time, in order to entice new customers to the then-burgeoning subscription service. Kenny Rogers makes a cameo appearance (visual only, not singing) in the montage of folks of various ethnicities plopping themselves down in front of a TV to enjoy pay cable.
“No Place Like HBO” promo, early 1980s (MP3)
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Inside HBO, early 1980s: At the time, most everyone was “new” to pay movie channels, so HBO thought it needed to explain to neophyte subscribers exactly how the laws of HBO physics worked. The channel produced a series of animated FAQ-style promos that answered such questions as “Why does HBO show things it’s shown before in the past?” and “Why does HBO show movies I haven’t heard of before?” Such questions seem quaint now, eh? Here’s a compilation of four of these “Inside HBO” spots.
“Inside HBO” montage, early 1980s (MP3)
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Cinemax Movie bumper, late 1980s: Wikipedia sez:
Cinemax launched in August 1980, introduced by its then on-air personality Robert Kulp. Kulp told viewers that Cinemax would be about movies and nothing but movies. At the time, HBO featured a wider range of programming, including documentaries, children’s entertainment, sporting events, and entertainment specials…Movie classics were a mainstay of [Cinemax] at its birth, “all uncut and commercial-free” as Kulp would say. A heavy schedule of films from the 50s-70s made up most of Cinemax’s program schedule.
Cinemax was often way cooler than HBO for me as a child because they showed a better selection of stuff — AND had the Max Headroom talk show! I remember catching this particular bumper in front of movies that I would watch at my friend’s house as a kid; my parents never wanted to cough up the extra dough for Cinemax.
“Cinemax Movie” feature presentation bumper music, late 1980s (MP3)
- bret
The Cinefamily November lineup’s been included in Stephen Saito’s “Holiday Repertory Calendar” listings on IFC’s blog.
Last night, Hadrian and I were invited to the AFI Fest’s screening of the brand-new Harmony Korine
A gang of elderly degenerates wanders aimlessly through suburban neighborhoods, wreaks havoc, and films their exploits on a decrepit VHS camcorder. All we see for the film’s 80 minutes are the images captured on this device: The trash humpers squatting to crap on driveways and doorsteps; the trash humpers smashing televisions, cinder blocks, and boom boxes in a desolate parking lot; the trash humpers hosing down their wheelchair in a carwash at night; the trash humpers jumping on a trampoline in the middle of the street; the trash humpers partying with some fat prostitutes; the trash humpers ogling a garbage can, while offscreen other trash humpers grunt lustily, cackle maniacally, and chant, sing, or simply yelp, “Git it!”
If all of this sounds completely idiotic, it is. But Korine’s perverse commitment to this idiocy holds the film together, allowing you to lose yourself (if you’re so inclined) in its grisly and analog-fuzzy view of the world.
I’ve had mixed feelings about Korine’s body of work over the years, but I was stoked to see some serious love for the distressed VHS aesthetic. Some interviews I’ve read have Korine stressing that maybe Trash Humpers shouldn’t even be called a “movie”, due to its extreme “narrative” circumstances, but there’s too much going on in the film to not call it a “film”. I’m still unsure, almost 24 hours after I saw it, what I thought of it. Here’s what the thing actually looks like:
And here’s what Korine had to say about it at the New York Film Festival:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Best moment of the Q&A last night at AFI:
Obnoxious Audience Member (giggling like a fool, and sounding like he’d been rehearsing the question in his car on the drive over to the theater): If you could pick any one historical figure to take a shit on your chest, who would it be and why?
Harmony Korine: Aw, c’mon, I’d never do that. You gotta draw the line somewhere.
- bret
When we’re not running around like chickens with their heads cut off here in the Cinefamily office, we’ve often thought “Ya know, it’s time we revamp that Cinefamily blog. We don’t use it, because we’ve thinking we need to revamp it first before we post anything further.”
Well, here ya go. New Wordpress blog, new era — and new postings. Stay tuned.
