Good Cinema, Bad Cinema.

[captainsblog]

We finished Holy Motors last night.

Wow.

At one point, I said to Eleanor, Forget Goddard, Truffaut, that carpetbagger Konigsberg and all that lot. This is the most quintessentially French film ever made. Surly people? Check! Accordions? Check! Cigarettes? Check!

But it's ethereal, and musical, and surreal as shit. I can understand why Adam Driver took an interest in the director's work and joined his upcoming project Annette, which will be in cinemas on August 6 and on Prime Video two weeks later.

But for our next act, I'm going in search of what may be the quintessentially worst film ever made anywhere.

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I came across it through a weird route.

Another film coming to Prime, this one a week from Saturday, is Val, a documentary about the life and times of Val Kilmer.  It was reviewed in the current New Yorker, and whenever we see Anthony Lane's byline on a review there, we know it's going to be fun.  After settling in by reaming the shit out of Settlers, Lane beats the once and former Batman senseless with this single portion of a paragraph:

We catch glimpses of a childhood in the San Fernando Valley; Kilmer was one of three brothers, who staged home movies of a rare inventiveness. We see clips of his time at Juilliard; two lines of a Hamlet soliloquy, again and again; and a dressing room in a New York theatre, where a couple of pallid striplings turn out to be Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn. We hear of Kilmer’s marriage to the British actress Joanne Whalley, and we learn that he was served with divorce papers while filming, or attempting to film, “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1996) with Marlon Brando. Discretion, I’m glad to report, is not the better part of Val. Watching this documentary is like having Dorian Gray give you a guided tour of his attic.

Call the fire department! That's burning! Yet, although I will probably check it out on Prime if I don't have to pay anything for it, tonight's entertainment, or attempt at entertainment, will be Val's earlier work, which our 30-branch library system has exactly one copy of, not checked out.

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I don't remember prior film versions of Dr. Moreau, much less this one; my main recollection of the story was a copy of the H.G. Wells original being a plot point in a mid-run episode of Orphan Black. The Lane review seemed to suggest that either the Kilmer version was never made or, at least, that he had dropped out of it.

Unfortunately, neither turned out to be the case.  However, Val was so upset about the divorce situation that he dropped the top-billed role and took on a lesser one. The bigger role, which went from Bruce Willis to Val to Rob Morrow and finally to famed future werewolf David Thewlis, was that of washed-up UN negotiator Edward Douglas. Or possibly Edward Prendick. You can never believe anything you read on Wikipedia, after all. Oh, but you must. Even if it's all bullshit, it's a wonderfully weird tale.

Willis left the gig, possibly also due to divorce reasons, and then Kilmer deferred to the lesser part. Former Cicely Alaska doctor Rob Morrow lasted two days on the set before they finally brought in a proper British actor with a stiff enough upper lip to handle the whole business.  All of these machinations came while the studio was changing directors, threatening to change directors, and extensively changing the script, including Thewlis essentially rewriting his entire part from scratch.

The only constant among this change was Marlon Brando. That can never be good.

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Despite his reduction in screen time, Kilmer still angered the big guy:

Brando routinely spent hours in his air-conditioned trailer when he was supposed to be on camera, while actors and extras sweltered in the tropical heat in full make-up and heavy costumes. The antipathy between Brando and Kilmer rapidly escalated into open hostility and on one occasion, as recounted in Lost Soul, this resulted in the cast and crew being kept waiting for hours, with each actor refusing to come out of his respective trailer before the other. New script pages were turned in only a few days before they were shot. [Ultimate director John] Frankenheimer and Kilmer had an argument on-set, which reportedly got so heated, Frankenheimer stated afterwards, "I don't like Val Kilmer, I don't like his work ethic, and I don't want to be associated with him ever again".

Ah, but actors and directors are always getting along like that. Brando had other problems, though:

According to Thewlis, "we all had different ideas of where it should go. I even ended up improvising some of the main scenes with Marlon". Thewlis went on to rewrite his character personally. The constant rewrites also got on Brando's nerves and, as on many previous productions, he refused to learn lines, so he was equipped with a small radio receiver, so that his assistant could feed his lines to him as he performed - a technique he had used on earlier films.

Thewlis recollects: "[Marlon would] be in the middle of a scene and suddenly he'd be picking up police messages and would repeat, 'There's a robbery at Woolworth's'". Meanwhile, friction between him and Kilmer elicited the former's quip: "Your problem is you confuse the size of your paycheck with the size of your talent". Upon completion of Kilmer's final scene, Frankenheimer is reported to have said to the crew, "Now get that bastard off my set".

Frankenheimer was the last man with hands on the camera, itself a line beginning with John Stanley, a music video director who progressed to the horror genre; he pitched a hissy when he found out that the studio was trying to get Roman Polanski on board after making sure he couldn't be extradited to America. He stayed on board, though, until the disputes among the actors proved too disruptive and the studio fired him. By fax.

After a subsequent hissy, the studio agreed to pay him his full directors fee if he kept quiet about the whole business. Which he did. Sort of:

Stanley had reportedly jokingly told the film's production designer to burn the set down, but when Stanley disappeared after being fired, security was tightened in case he was actually trying to sabotage the project. Stanley himself later revealed that he had in fact stayed in Australia - suffering a total emotional breakdown, he had retreated to a remote area in the Cairns region to recover. There, he had a chance meeting with some of the film's former production staff, who had been rehired as extras and were camping in the area. It was confirmed by these same production staff in the Lost Soul documentary that with their help Stanley secretly came back to the set over several days, disguised in full costume as one of the dog-men, and performed as an extra on the film he had originally been hired to direct. It has also been reported that he showed up at the film's wrap party, where he ran into Kilmer, who was said to have apologized profusely for Stanley's removal from the film.

I'm picking up the lone copy of this mess when our local branch, blessed with it, opens at 4.  Hopefully by then I can get Joel and the bots to come over.  Or at least Leonard Pinth-Garnell.