CINEMATIC ARCHIVES: HERSCHEL GORDON LEWIS

One could fault the small time filmmakers for allowing their work to fade into obscurity. This argument is null; if the artist were to feed his selfish grandeur and lobby for his own masterpieces to be re-released and enjoy a new wave of publicity, the purity of his work is then compromised, the masterpiece perverted into a thick film of capitalist algae, the artist transformed into a publicity-driven vulture. It takes a source outside the artist himself, the heroic crusader known as the film archivist.

The good news is that scores of film archivists -Kino Films, Dennis Doros, Amy Heller, and Mike Vraney to name a few- are aggressively restoring countless obscure films, returning the voices to the humble and forgotten artists like Harry Everett Smith, Oscar Micheaux, and Bill McGaha.

One of the finest examples of Mike Vraney's restored masterpieces is Herschel Gordon Lewis' 1967 classic The Blast Off Girls. For those familiar with Herschel G, the first associations coming to mind will likely be campy schlock classics like The Gore-Gore Girls and 2000 Maniacs. Having achieved a cult following via these twisted scream-flicks, Lewis took an admirable risk by creating a film that explores the motivation behind a frustrated music executive who strives to perch upon the industry's highest throne, yet finds himself trapped, roaming a destructive cyclical path derivative of DH Lawrence's The Rocking Horse Winner. Lewis visually narrates this saga by utilizing a subterfuge of converse film technology highlighted by garish colors in everything from costume to set design, revealing himself to be both filmmaker and visionary.

The film opens with a one-hit-wonder group known as "Charlie" abandoning their manager, Boojie Baker, a hungry young music executive desperately digging his way toward prosperity. After initial success, the band tires under their mentor's tyrannical oversight, and they abandon him during a critical juncture, leaving Boojie humiliated before the industry he wishes to rule. Seemingly undaunted, Boojie Baker scouts new flesh on which to build his stellar dream.

Cut to a dismal nightclub fronted by a down and out garage band. With no time to scout bands, Boojie -with his bombshell blond of a girlfriend by his side- picks the first band he sees to be his next one-hit-wonder, and aptly dubs them "The Big Blast!"

The character of Boojie Baker is the antagonist, but he is also the tragic figure whom we eventually pity. He is every bit hungry to create a band that is an overnight sensation as he is to wield power over them. That is to say, he lives the role of the heartless executive who rules with an iron fist; the problem being that he has no true leverage in the music industry, and he manages to burn his bridges before he finishes building them. Boojie possesses the cunning and drive that turns The Big Blast into an overnight sensation, but treats them with so much contempt that even the flood of money and fame cannot prevent his prodigies from turning on him. Boojie's tools to attract, sway, and blackmail his clients throughout the movie come in the form of voluptuous modern day sirens, high society parties, and easy cash payoffs. He holds the proverbial gun to their heads, ignorant that The Sword of Damocles dangles above his own.

Amidst this brilliant celluloid stands a sequence in the film that waves a socio-political rallying cry that is equally important as the surrounding saga of Boojie Baker, with surrealism so intense that it comes dangerously close to eclipsing the overlying message of the film. But Lewis' genius lies in delivering this scene powerfully -almost without warning- winding it up promptly, and then returning to the core of the story.

The sequence in question involves the character of Boojie's right hand man, a con-artist of a sidekick named Gordie. Gordie is portrayed brilliantly by Ray Sager, one of underground cinema's most underrated performers. Sager possesses a distinctive commanding baritone speaking voice that so many directors and producers have missed out on.

We open with Gordie and all the members of The Big Blast, crammed into a clunky convertible station wagon, cruising the streets for a decent restaurant on a hot day. They slowly cruise into the parking lot of an outdoor shopping center to the lone strum of a bass guitar. Gordie hops out of the car and approaches an unmarked washed-out salmon color building. Upon entering the establishment, we see a close up of his face as he inquires "Hey, man! Do you serve fried chicken?"

The camera cuts to man behind the counter, who is none other than Colonel Harland Sanders. He replies: "Do we serve fried chicken?" and with a comical chirp "Hooooeeee, we DO serve fried chicken!" TV audiences of that day clearly remember the late Colonel Sanders on TV commercials for his chain of "Kentucky Fried Chicken" eateries, and they will likely fall over laughing at this scene, mistaking it for comedy relief. This is a pity since this scene -and more importantly, the scene that follows- is a rare instance where The Colonel's lesser known performance art has been captured on film.

While Harland Sanders is best remembered as the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, few recognize that he was the rare Renaissance man who worked commercialism into a school of performance art that Dr. Hermester Barrington later classified as Cerebra-Reprimére. Although Sanders was made an honorary Kentucky colonel by then Lieutenant Governor Lawrence Weatherby in 1935, it was not until 1949 when Sanders morphed into the protago-subterfugerist persona of The Colonel by growing his snow-white goatee, decking himself out in the trademark white suit and black-string tie, and putting his artwork into motion. Soon thereafter began his whirlwind conceptual performance tour; few people were lucky to see it, as each performance was unannounced. According to The Encyclopedia of World Biography, Sanders "often burst into a restaurant's kitchen to scold an employee for not cooking his gravy correctly. Sanders would then show him how to cook it right." One can only assume that later revolutionary figures like Abbie Hoffman and Huey Newton found inspiration in The Colonel's unorthodox expression.

This agitated form of Sander's Cerebra-Reprimére performance was -to the best of this author's knowledge- never caught on film. But Herschel Gordon Lewis captured a much more compassionate and meaningful expression of the inner socio-economical revolution that may have stirred in the recesses of Harland Sanders psyche.

The conversation involving Ray Sager and Harland Sanders results in The Colonel promising free dinners to his band of hungry musicians if they would play an impromptu concert outside the restaurant. The scene that follows shows The Big Blast performing a free-form instrumental piece in the parking lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken before an audience of several dozen middle-class children between the ages of three and fifteen. They are clearly "rocking out" on the gleeful brink of madness. We then see Colonel Sanders, holding a bucket of fried chicken in his hands, marching to the front of band. He then lays the bucket of fried chicken upon one of the band's speakers that is strategically placed directly in front of the band members. The Colonel places the chicken as one would set incense and flowers at the foot of a religious icon. He then salutes the band, and dances off camera.

It would be difficult to overstate the depth of this scene. The sacrificial chicken placed upon the speaker screams the message that the voice on youth and anarchy in the 1960s shall never hunger nor become ill, as it is nourished by an unlikely comrade from the old school; gradually grow louder until the working class stiffs of America burst from their work-to-the-bone prisons, and liberate themselves into artisans, healers and sailors. This depiction of the unity between The Big Blast and Colonel Sanders resurfaced in 2005 in several passages in Haruki Murakami's best selling and critically acclaimed novel Kafka on the Shore, in which the apparition of Colonel Sanders guides a blue collar youth to liberation. Perhaps Murakami's prose indicates that Sanders' vision in the radical sixties is finally being taken seriously in the 21^st Century. In the words of Colonel Harland Sanders himself: "No hours, nor amount of labor, nor amount of money would deter me from giving the best that there was in me." While The Colonel did indeed shout this loud declaration one evening, with his face flushed red with anger as he angrily pounded his fists on a podium (presumably), little information hints as to where and when: via my recent studies in literary history and Audio-Expressive Encrypte-Therapy, I suspect he made this proletariatial motivational statement during an unannounced appearance at the Krishna Consciousness Moves West benefit concert just before Alan Ginsberg's reading at The Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco on January 29, 1967. (Editor's note: if anybody has any evidence supporting or refuting this theory, Mr. Green would appreciate an e-mail at rhondavew@aol.com)

There is also little doubt the dancing children outside of the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant are Lewis' and Sanders' contemporary translation of the youths in Greek mythology that performed Yeranos, or "The Crane Dance" to celebrate the slaying of The Minotaur at the hands of Theseus. As The Minotaur was the monstrosity that resulted from a bull impregnating Pasiphae (wife of Minos, King of Crete), it is obvious that Colonel Sanders saw the modern day corporate charlatan "Bulls of the stock market" as the slain Minotaur, leaving The Colonel to celebrate the unlikely victor in the rare war pitting John Q. Citizen against the scumbags of Madison Avenue. The Beast is dead, the children do dance, and the bucket of chicken is left as a sacrificial thanks to The Big Blast. The band obviously represents the victorious Theseus; perhaps Sanders saw the emergence of electronic groovy-rock and roll as the archetype of gallant testosterone-packed youth that could tear the horns from the skull of greedy industrialist Minotaur, leaving its eyeballs dangling from the sockets and its brain spilling from its core (giving possible credence to this assumption is the fact that around this time in the sixties Sanders did indeed form an enduring bond with "Country Joe and The Fish" drummer Greg Dewey when discussing the positive contributions of the hippie community).

The film now shifts into Boojie Baker putting his exploitive plan into motion. His most important blackmail victim is Marty, a record producer who gives potent thumbs-up or thumbs-down to potential clients. Marty sees nothing promising in The Big Blast, and refuses to produce their work. But Baker perceives the corporate giant's stuffy rejection before the fact, and therefore throws a private party for Marty, which is hosted by a bevy of beautiful women who deliver unto Marty a night of hot lust and play. The night of sex is, of course, secretly photographed by Boojie, and leaves Marty no choice but to give the band the "thumbs-up" to a recording contract.

Although Lewis has a consistent artistic flair when toying with color in this film, the scene in which Marty arrives at the sexual shindig is the first scene in which the director truly manipulates multiple agitated hues to bond cinematic coitus with the storyline. The hostess who greets Marty at the door is clad in a bra and a pair of tight slacks splattered with a multi-colored floral print reminiscent of the "Flower Power" movement of that era. It took three viewings of this film until it hit me that each hue in the floral pattern shadowed one another to symbolize an anarchic version of military camouflage, and the woman's near-topless presence rallies as the spiritual charge of the violent maternal light brigade.

Fast forward to the footage of The Big Blast recording in a humbled Marty's studio, and note the overexposed and washed-out quality of the film, coupled with the drawn out footage of The Big Blast recording a devastating improvisational cut. Immediately following that scene we view a visual collage of scenes featuring Boojie and the boys in the band enjoying the riches of instant fame, everything from hot women, cold champagne to shiny cars. This sequence showing off the spoils of success is the polar opposite of the recording session: from the clothes to the curtains, all the colors shine so garishly that you can almost hear each hue shout so loud that it shatters the eardrum of your soul. This sudden shift from the dull recording session to the loud array of screaming bright colors of nightlife transforms us. Where the boys in The Big Blast once performed music with passion, they are now merely working a day job, going through the motions. But jump ahead to the living-it-up sequence and we see a world packed with more colors any of us have seen in everyday real life. This signifies the classic manic-depressive nightmare that too many artists suffer: what once was dance is now misery, and what shines brightly today is the delusion that burns into what little remains of your essence.

The manner in which Lewis masters color to mark the contrast of misery and hallucinatory bliss seems to foretell the oft overlooked use of a neglected filming technique called Speedcolor, perfected and used most prominently the following year in William McGaha's The Speed Lovers. This over-the-top shift lends the characters' soul to the audience just long enough to shoot them up with a fix of empathy. The rest of the movie allows the viewer to experience the depths of angst rarely gripped by the cinema.

Despite Bookie Baker's successful attempts at blackmailing Marty's -and later The Big Blast themselves- his arrogance and hunger for a vice-like grip on humanity damns him in the end. He blackmails his band by throwing them a whore-and-reefer party, only to have the epitome of a G-Man raid the party and threaten to bust the sativa inhaling youngsters. Of course, this law enforcement official is merely a civilian ruse perpetrated by Boojie, who magically rescues his boys from the bust in hopes of obtaining their eternal devotion.

Yet our Big Blast boys merely feign naiveté, realizing the contrived world Boojie Baker built around them. And they play their cards with a cleverness the director keenly hides from us; when The Big Blast receives their first live television appearance, it is finally Baker's day-in-the-sun, his breakthrough opportunity to become a genuine player in the big leagues. The Big Blast set up their instruments on the soundstage, and then with sheer Pierrothic childish behavior, sabotage their set right before air time. They taunt and humiliate Boojie Baker in front of the TV host and his crew, shattering his dreams once again.

The Big Blast, while seemingly finished with the world of rock music, instead earn the deepest respect and awe of the TV host/producer. While never saying it outright, he is now their devotee, and they remain Theseus. You can smell The Colonel's eleven herbs and spices. The herbs are your senses. You are the herbs. We are one.