It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (20 page)

‘Mr Isaacs to the wind machine please!’

It came as little surprise to discover that, despite my English accent (and despite the fact that I
hadn’t
actually blown the bloody drummer off stage) I wouldn’t be required for any more casual crewing work in the near future. Still, with $100 in my pocket I felt like Little Richard preparing to rip it up and ball tonight, and duly emboldened I decided to strike out on my new career as an international film journalist. I had always said that if ever I got to LA it would be
easy
to bag some choice interviews which I could sell back home in the UK. After all, why wait for film-makers to do the press junkets in Blighty when they were all
right here
in Hollywood just waiting to speak their mind to a spunky British scribe? It sounded straightforward. And oddly enough, it was.

I began with a call to Wes Craven’s office, for which I had acquired an address and phone number from the Directors Guild of America. During my brief stay in New York, I had endeavoured to stay out of Saul’s hair by visiting the local cinemas to see movies which wouldn’t be released in the UK for months (or maybe years) to come. Top of my list was
Shocker
, a film about a serial killer whose execution by electric chair turns him into a high-voltage phantom, able to rip heads through phone lines and power cables. Daft, but fun. Craven’s best-known work was the chiller
A Nightmare on Elm Street
, which gave the world the spectre of Freddy Krueger, and redefined the ‘plastic reality’ of modern horror cinema. But there was something more controversial lurking in Craven’s back catalogue which still remained beyond the pale of British law.

A return trip to Mondo Video had secured a copy of
Last House on the Left
, an uncomfortable mix of earnest art-house invention (the plot is lifted from Ingmar Bergman’s
The Virgin Spring
) and leery grindhouse gore (rape, torture, disembowelling) with bizarrely ill-judged interludes of chicken-flapping comedy. Like
Texas Chain Saw
,
Last House
had long been banned in Britain, and it was easy to see why; our censors were never going to take kindly to a film which looked so disreputably shabby, and featured scenes of chainsaw-wielding carnage and death by blowjob. Even hardened stateside sensibilities were offended, with audiences in New York reportedly storming the projection booth, hell-bent on ripping the print from the projector and slicing it to smithereens. All this was, of course, great publicity for the film-makers, who marketed
Last House
with the immortal tag line: ‘To Avoid Fainting, Keep Repeating It’s ONLY A MOVIE …’

Watching
Last House on the Left
at Tim and Jenny’s flat was a somewhat grubby experience which they politely left me to enjoy on my own. The next morning, I rolled up to Craven’s sunny office on Wilshire Boulevard where (to my surprise) he had agreed to meet me and talk about ‘whatever you like, kiddo’. He greeted me warmly, I pulled out my tape recorder, and for an hour we shot the breeze about cinema and censorship. He was warm, witty and intelligent, and I was utterly seduced. He talked about
Last House
as if it were made yesterday, describing it as an angry response to TV images of the Vietnam War, discussing the visceral elements in terms of confrontation and catharsis, and remembering
the intestine-ripping scene that ‘you only see very briefly’ because it’s actually a bicycle inner tube. Of the film’s vociferous detractors, he championed the protestors’ right to tear up his movie if they felt moved to do so, whilst railing against the official ratings boards for being biased against low-budget movies. His position, in short, was that while he abhorred state censorship, he applauded spontaneous community action.

He was my new best friend.

Unbeknownst to Craven, this ‘friendship’ would backfire spectacularly in future years when my enthusiasm for his work ironically caused British censors to lay into his film with renewed enthusiasm. Having been banned for nearly thirty years,
Last House
found its way back to the newly liberalised British censors in 2001, when they finally agreed to pass it on video with only sixteen seconds of cuts. Spurred on by my encouraging words, the distributors decided to go to the Video Appeals Committee, where a group of media-literate concerned bods (including
Blue Peter
stalwart Biddy Baxter!) heard arguments for releasing the film uncut on the grounds of its great historical importance. Central to their case was an erudite essay written by an acclaimed ‘specialist witness’ (i.e. me) which contextualised the film within the evolution of the modern horror genre, and verified its status as a key work of American independent cinema. It was a bravura polemic – weighty, profound, and forthright.

And they were having none of it.

After considering the evidence, the good folk of the Video Appeals Committee reported that in their opinion the
sixteen seconds of cuts which we were contesting were in fact far too lenient for such a revolting and frankly indefensible film. As a result, the BBFC not only upheld those cuts – they
doubled
them! Thanks to my earnest outpourings, I had effectively prevented
Last House
from being released in an all but uncut form.

With friends like me, who needs enemies?

(Since then, the BBFC have looked at the movie
again
– this time without the aid of my learned input – and decided that it
is
now fit to be released uncut after all. Some would say that it was the passing of time which caused them to reverse their earlier decision. Others would argue that I was the problem all along.)

Back in LA, I turned my attention to Sam Raimi. Today, Raimi is one of the most financially successful film-makers of all time, thanks to his blockbusting Spider-Man movies, all three of which enjoyed record-breaking openings worldwide. In the eighties, however, Raimi was still best known as the creator of
The Evil Dead
, a low-budget splatter comedy which had been deemed legally obscene by several British courts, and had become the bête noire of anti-’video nasty’ campaigners like Mary Whitehouse. The British censor’s report on
The Evil Dead
is one of the funniest pieces of ‘serious’ literature ever written, as sober adults struggled to defuse the delightfully disgusting power of a deliberately stupid movie with a series of increasingly impotent alterations.

‘Reduce sight of Shelley chewing off her own hand’ the report reads po-facedly, before going on to insist that the
distributors ‘remove close shots of Scotty chopping Shelley’s hands and legs off’ and ‘reduce to minimum fluid spewing from Linda’s mouth after falling on dagger [and] trunk gushing blood after head cut off’. Call me childish, but doesn’t reading that make you want to run off and watch
The Evil Dead
uncut
right now
?

When Radio Four asked me to appear on a programme called
With Great Pleasure
(imagine
Desert Island Discs
but with books) in 2008, I agreed on the understanding that I could include the BBFC’s report on
The Evil Dead
as one of my favourite works of literature of all time. To their great credit, the BBFC granted me permission to make them look ridiculous in public by getting actress Amelia Bullmore to read out the cuts list to a packed theatre audience in the style of Joyce Grenfell.’Remove
entirely
the second shot of headless torso spurting blood on man’s face as he lies on top of it,’ Amelia recited in schoolmarm-ish tones, to the delight of the audience, all of whom seemed to find this as funny as I did. Sadly, the radio audience never got to share the joke; when the powers that be at Radio Four heard the tape of the recording, they decided that even the
description
of what had been cut from
The Evil Dead
was too revolting for daytime broadcast and it all got cut – again! Meanwhile the BBFC had gone ahead and given
The Evil Dead
a clean bill of health
uncut
, and I have the censor’s certificate at home, framed and hanging on the wall, to prove it.

When I first met Raimi, he was hard at work putting the finishing touches on
Darkman
, the movie that would effectively herald his move from the fringes of ‘esoteric’
film-making to the very heart of the mainstream market. Like Wes Craven, Raimi was surprisingly eager to talk to some previously unheard-of young hack, and I was beginning to think that Tim was right about the English accent being some form of all-access visa. Certainly I had no way of proving to Raimi that I was worth an hour of his time – for all he knew, I could just have been some time-wasting horror fan who wanted nothing more than to meet his genre idols. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what I was. Except that when I got back to the UK I did indeed write the interview up for
Time Out
where it commanded a couple of pages of space, not to mention bagging a front-cover feature (my first) in the specialist horror magazine
Fear
which – like so many other organisations I have worked for – would eventually go down in flames.

The ‘curse of Kermode’.

The fact that Craven and Raimi, both of whom had helmed notoriously ‘nasty’ and ‘obscene’ films, turned out to be such nice intelligent people pretty much set the tone for the rest of my journalistic career. In the twenty years since I did those first stumbling interviews, I have met hundreds, if not thousands, of film-makers, and based on my (admittedly selective) experience I have reached the following conclusion: the nastier the movie, the nicer the people who made it (and possibly vice versa). Unlike the spoiled-brat superstars of mainstream Hollywood cinema, horror films tend to feature hard-working actors like Gunnar Hansen, who played the terrifying Leatherface in the long-banned
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
, but who came across as a lovely
soft-spoken bloke when I interviewed him for the Channel 4 documentary
Scream and Scream Again
. Slasher cinema’s grisly special effects are dreamed up by painstakingly talented make-up artists like Tom Savini, a thoughtful soul who (it was rumoured) once made a latex severed head
so
authentic that the police thought it was real and radioed in a murderous decapitation. And the fans who
watch
these movies are invariably the most innocuous and introverted bunch of misfits you’ll ever meet in a cinema, no harm to anyone but themselves. Even that gore-hound’s bible
Fangoria
magazine (aka ‘Exploding Heads Monthly’) was edited by all-round New York good guy Tony Timpone who showed up at horror conventions with his equally lovely wife Marguerite, herself a huge fan of Herman’s Hermits and all things quaintly Victoriana. These people are splendidly warm and cuddly company and I would commend them to you unconditionally. Jeffrey Katzenberg on the other hand, the movie mogul behind all those ‘family orientated’ animated hits like
Shrek
, is … well,
not
cuddly. Somewhat
spiky
, in fact. I once did an onstage event with Katzenberg in Bristol at which he was meant to be discussing his deep love of animation, but he sneered and called me an idiot when I told him that I thought
Mary Poppins
was a masterpiece.

Sorry, but anyone who doesn’t get
Mary Poppins
has no soul.

Anyway, back to my West Coast adventures. By day four I was starting to think that moving to LA might not be such a bad idea after all. Not to be a pop star – although obviously if DAM took off, then so be it – but as an International
Film Journalist. I really liked the sound of this phrase, particularly the ‘International’ bit. And the ‘Journalist’ bit too, come to that. It sounded so much better than ‘film critic’. For a brief, deluded moment, I convinced myself that I was actually the kind of person who
could
pull off this glamorous transatlantic lifestyle, seeing films in the US, filing copy in the UK, jetting back home every few months just to gloat about how fabulous my sun-drenched life had become.

Of course, this was all just nonsense. I am not that person, and never will be. I grew up in Barnet and my conceptual map of the world goes: Southampton, Soho, St Albans, Manchester, the Isle of Man, Cornwall; everywhere else. Oh, and Liverpool, for personal reasons. And Shetland. And … well, lots of other places actually, but none of them in America. Except for Georgetown.

Ah, Georgetown. For reasons which I have already explained,
The Exorcist
(‘The greatest movie ever made’, Mark Kermode, Radio One) has cast a long shadow over my life. So as I gazed out over the smog-filled streets of Los Angeles, with interviews with Wes Craven and Sam Raimi safely captured on my trusty Dictaphone, I knew instinctively what the next step in my International Film Journalist career must be. I picked up the phone, inhaled deeply, and took a running jump into the abyss.

‘Hello, my name is Mark Kermode. I’m a journalist from London, working for
Time Out
and other top publications. And I’d like to interview Linda Blair, please.’

‘OK,’ said the ever so slightly waspish voice at the end of the phone.’And what did you say your name was?’

‘Kermode. Mark Kermode. I’m a journalist from the UK. And I’m a really big fan of Linda Blair. I’ve seen everything she’s ever made. Not just
The Exorcist
, ha ha ha. No, no, I’ve seen ’em all!’ And I started to list them.’
Roller Boogie
,
Hell Night
,
Wild Horse Hank
,
Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic
,
Witchery
,
Born Innocent
(cut
and
uncut, of course),
Up Your Alley
,
Airport 75
,
The Heretic
(both versions),
Chained Heat
,
Red Heat
,
Savage Streets
,
Savage Island
…’

I stopped suddenly, realising that I was starting to sound like a mental case. Or a stalker. Or a stalking mental case. Whatever. Either way, this was not good – particularly since Blair had reportedly been handling death threats from marauding loony-toons ever since
The Exorcist
made her a demonic child star at the age of fourteen. Hard though it is to believe, some cinema audiences apparently have a problem distinguishing fiction from reality, and thus Blair’s brilliantly convincing portrayal of a possessed child led some morons to believe that she was actually the Devil. Duh!?