WEB
EXCLUSIVE Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Arnold's
Sexual Recall: Gloria Allred calls on the Terminator
to step forward and answer detailed questions about his 1977 interview
with Oui magazine
Out
of Left Field JAMIE
WOLF watches Howard
Dean’s presidential campaign beginning early this year, when he
was still considered a mere asterisk, a straight-talking former governor
from a tiny state with a single issue: his opposition to the war with
Iraq. She picks up the trail at a Hollywood-heavy fund-raiser, sees
it through Dean’s bad television appearances and staffing problems,
to his growing grassroots support, surprising Internet-based fund-raising
successes and the covers of both Time and Newsweek.
Along the way, she sits down with the candidate, and brings us up
to date with this week’s triumphant Sleepless Summer Tour.
Raw Deals: BILL
BRADLEY, on the recall-campaign trail, comes up with a
secret Sharon Davis memo blaming Arnold for violence in America
and raises questions about the Times poll and Cruz’s fund-raising.
MARC COOPER chides Big
Labor for being out to lunch with its anti-recall vote. ROBERT
GREENE looks to the Voting
Rights Act for answers to the last legal challenge to the October
7 election.
The Monkey Wrench
Guerrillas: SUVs, beware. The Earth Liberation Front strikes car dealerships.
ALEX MARKELS probes ELF’s
mission and interviews
its leader. GREG GOLDIN climbs behind the wheel of a Hummer.
The
Neocons' New Enemy: The CIA: Laurie Mylroie has some crazy ideas
about 9/11, and how Iraq played a role with al Qaeda. Certain unexpected
circles in Washington are taking her seriously. BY DAVID CORN
A
Nuclear Standoff: And don’t forget North Korea. KEVIN Y. KIM interviews
America’s pre-eminent Korea historian Bruce Cumings about what might
come out of this week’s multilateral talks with North Korea.
Plus, STEVEN
LEIGH MORRIS remembers one of Sunset Hall’s stalwart
residents; ROBERT GREENE on the legal debate over the
Denny beating tape, and other matters; and CHRISTINE PELISEK’S
Ambushed
on the code of silence surrounding Bush’s potential conflicts of interest.
WEB
EXCLUSIVE The
Island Chronicles: MARK FRAUENFELDER and CARLA
SINCLAIR continue their experiment in South Pacific living. Read
their latest dispatch exclusively on LAWeekly.com!
A
CONSIDERABLE TOWN Luna vista: A cluster of movie geeks was over the moon for
stars Tatum and Ryan O’Neal when their handprints, along with director
Peter Bogdanovich’s, were cemented outside Silver Lake’s Vista Theater
prior to a 30th-anniversary screening of the 1973 gem Paper Moon,
which CHUCK WILSON says is still perfection.
Coffee achievers: Call him Al. That’s what CHRISTOPHER JOLLY did when
he ran into Al Gore at the Farmers Market Starbucks. Hijinks, sort
of, ensued.
Old school: Speaking of anniversaries of perfect movies (see above),
MICHAEL SIMMONS just happened to be at Hollywood and Highland for
a re-enactment of the climactic “deathmobile” parade commemorating
the 25th anniversary and DVD release of National Lampoon’s Animal
House. It was less than anarchic.
CONSIDERABLE
PEOPLE
The yoga principle: CHRISTINE PELISEK strikes a siddhasana
pose with Belmont High teacher Koren Paalman.
Metal head: JUDITH LEWIS gets close to the machine with the Rev. Gadget,
a.k.a. Greg Abbott.
POWERLINES
HAROLD MEYERSON, in a toast to Labor Day, notes the progress of the
living-wage campaign and of L.A.’s labor movement.
CAKEWALK
Searching for signs of democracy in Washington, D.C. BY ERIN AUBRY
KAPLAN
DISSONANCE
MARC COOPER chides Big Labor for being out to lunch with its anti-recall
vote.
LIVE
IN L.A. Performance
reviews: Sunset Junction; Bright Eyes, Belle & Sebastian;
Vertical Horizon; Lexicon, Northern State; Beans.
A
LOT OF NIGHT MUSIC At the
Bowl: Vivid Vivaldi, middling Mark O’Connor; Leif Ove Andsnes’
shimmering, steely Schubert. BY ALAN RICH
STYLE Fresh
made daily: SEVEN McDONALD visits Matrushka Construction, a new
happening/clothing store that’s so experiential and inexpensive it
defies the basic concept of shopping.
Nowhere To Hide Filmmaker Floyd Mutrux by Chuck Stephens
(Photo by Anne Fishbein)
Sitting in the sun room of his Beverly Hills home, Floyd Mutrux starts by saying, “I just kind of . . . I don’t . . . I’m not of . . . ” then stops for a second, waiting for the words to come. Dressed in shorts and a sweatshirt, his thick bolt of gray, white and peach colored–hair swept straight back, the 59-year-old Mutrux looks like he might be a legendary wave-torn surfer, the kind of guy who’s seen his share of Big Wednesdays. Actually, he is that other sort of legendary Southern California archetype: a filmmaker. And what he finally chooses to say is this: “I’m not in Hollywood.” If you’re like a large proportion of the movie-going public, most of whom have never heard of Mutrux, that statement probably makes sense. The truth, as usual, is more complex. “When Variety,” Mutrux continues, “wrote [in the mid-’70s] that the five great directors of the period would be Spielberg, Lucas, Mutrux, Scorsese and Terry Malick, well . . . Terry went to live in Texas. But I found a way to hide right here.”
A white-light guy in the white-heat moment of New Hollywood, Mutrux seemed for a blink like the rightful heir to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising: His films were funny, freaky, dangerous as rock & roll, and portended a potential combination of Mean Streets edginess and Badlands beauty. But after a couple of misfires, the white light faded. Today, Mutrux remains one of Hollywood’s great unknowns, despite the evidence of success that covers his walls: Artwork for the films he’s written and directed — Dusty and Sweets McGee; Aloha, Bobby and Rose; American Hot Wax — hangs alongside memorabilia from the many films he thought up, waited to make, or sold and walked away from. Dick Tracy, Urban Cowboy, The Untouchables, American Me and Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke — those were all Mutrux inventions, and he’s cashed the checks to prove it. “I’m just one of the oddball guys who fell through the cracks,” he likes to kid.
Probably the best known of the films that Mutrux can claim as his and his alone is American Hot Wax, a roiling portrait of legendary 1950s record producer Alan Freed that Greil Marcus once called “the most emotionally honest film about rock & roll ever made.” But it’s his first film, Dusty and Sweets McGee, made in 1970, the year after Sha Na Na played Woodstock, that may well be remembered as his greatest, though few have ever seen it. Shot on locations along Sunset and in the Valley, Dusty is a loving study of hungry souls in grimy hip-huggers going through the everyday paces of scoring dope and hunting for veins. Warner Bros. withdrew the film a week after its initial release, largely on the basis of a Time magazine review that worried the film was “too much absorbed by the mechanics of addiction.” It’s been buried ever since.
Warners was wrong, even if Time was right: Dusty and Sweets McGee is excruciating in the authenticity of its detail. Based on interviews with real-life junkies in Hollywood, and shot on short ends by cinematographer William Fraker, it was made for 56,000 bucks and moves like a photograph from Larry Clark’s Tulsa come to life. Its music cues, too, are as authentic as the abscesses on the arms of its real-life junkie stars: a mix of greaser anthems and drug-pop, all knit together by the brayings of notorious L.A. disc jockey, the Weird Beard. Mutrux and close friend Ricky Nelson designed the soundtrack as an homage to the then-popular Cruisin’ compilation albums, then learned about “homage,” Hollywood-style, when George Lucas lifted the film’s sonic template for American Graffiti.
“There has always been a large appetite for the pilferage of ideas in Hollywood,” Mutrux sighs, “but the ethics and degree of integrity in this town have never been at a lower point than they are today. I don’t even want to write any more hit movies, because the girl and boy geniuses at the studios will take a look at them and think one thing: How can we ‘improve’ the material? Give them a carefully crafted screenplay, and they’ll ‘improve’ it right up onto the shelf.”
“The second act of my career,” as Mutrux calls the ’90s, didn’t go as well as planned. There Goes My Baby, a film Variety, without irony, called “the best coming of age movie since American Graffiti,” vanished into the black hole of the Orion bankruptcy. Two potential projects with John Travolta attached, one about dancing, one about renegade cops at LAX, remain in perpetual pre-production. “But I don’t give a fuck,” says Mutrux with a grin. “I’ve sold a lot of scripts, and it’s not like I’ve gotten fucked over or anything. And now, Act 3 is here.” On Broadway, he hopes, with a musical he’s co-written and plans to direct. “It’s based on the life of a legendary rock & roll star,” Mutrux says cryptically, knowing how good ideas in this town tend to go astray. “I’ve scored all my films to the car radio, because I believe rock & roll is a fervent, infinitely powerful force. It brought down the Berlin Wall. Why shouldn’t I put it on the stage?”
Mutrux and Fraker will appear at a screening of Dusty and Sweets McGee at the Los Angeles Film School on Friday, August 25. See Film & Video Events for further information.
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