The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (3 page)

Screenwriter Barry Blaustein had a terrible secret. A film and television veteran, Blaustein had written for
Saturday Night Live
and penned several successful Eddie Murphy movies, all the while keeping a unique personal preference under wraps. Then he was outed — Barry Blaustein was a professional wrestling fan. “It's like when some guys watch X-rated movies and someone comes into the house and they quickly try and hide the stuff,” he says. “It was like that with me and wrestling.”

You might not recognize his name, but if you are a comedy fan, you are undoubtedly familiar with Barry Blaustein's work. A prolific four-year stint as a writer for
Saturday Night Live
yielded some of Eddie Murphy's most memorable characters, including Tyrone “C-I-L-L my landlord” Green and Buckwheat. Having conquered the chaotic world of
SNL
, Blaustein (and collaborator David Sheffield) moved west in 1984 to write for the big screen. In Hollywood the working relationship with Murphy continued as Blaustein peppered the scripts of
Boomerang
,
The Nutty Professor
, and
The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
with laughs. It was the success of that trio of movies, produced by Imagine Films, and a surprise birthday party that led Blaustein down the path to directing a documentary about his lifelong passion, wrestling.

“My wife threw a surprise birthday party for me about five years ago and invited everybody that I knew,” Blaustein told
Reel to Real
in 1999. “I heard a familiar voice of a wrestler named Dusty Rhodes. He said, ‘Come on out, This Is Your Life!' I walked out in the backyard, and there was everybody that I knew. My father had built a little podium that looked like a wrestling ring. I was totally humiliated because everybody found out that I liked wrestling.” With his dirty little secret made public, he decided to document his love of the sport on film.

“It is hard to get funding for a documentary in the States,” said Blaustein. “You can get a government grant if your film is about black lung disease among coal miners in West Virginia, but not for a movie about wrestling.” Blaustein took advantage of his longtime association with Imagine and pitched the idea of a wrestling documentary, budgeted at a half-million dollars. “That is nothing for a documentary,” says Blaustein. “It is the shrimp cocktail at the premiere of
Nutty Professor II
. A drop in the bucket. I think they did it as a favor to me. It was like, ‘You know he's written a lot of movies for us, let's throw him a bone. It means a lot to him.' They had no expectations for the film whatsoever.”

With Imagine on board, Blaustein was ready to rumble. Using his downtime on the weekends, he assembled a small crew and shot a variety of storylines over five years. “I just wanted to go out and do something for myself,” he said. “It was revitalizing, like I was back in college again. When you are in college you feel like you can do anything, and you approach without fear. That is how I approached this film.”

Over time Blaustein pieced together a film that works on an almost Shakespearean level. There is tragedy, rage, humor, violence, intrigue, hucksterism, and real human stories. It uncovers the carny aspects of wrestling, which is surprising as it was made with the complete co-operation of the World Wrestling Federation. Well,
almost
complete co-operation. “I say my knees are worse than any wrestler because of the begging,” says Blaustein. “And my lips are pretty parched too; they're just getting their feeling back. It took about a year, or year and a half of chasing Vince [McMahon, owner of the WWF] to get him to agree to this. When I caught Vince, I caught him on a good day. Wrestling wasn't as popular, and I was able to convince him through passion and conviction that this would be good for wrestling.

“He gave me full access, but later tried to pull out of it. He wanted to invest in the movie, then tried to buy it outright. I said no, and this is a man who is not used to hearing the word no. He went out of his way to make sure people didn't know about it.”

Before running afoul of McMahon, Blaustein captured some eye-opening images. He follows two wrestling wannabes, Michael Modest and Tony Jones, as they go for their big break, and then gives us a rare backstage look at McMahon's analysis of their performance and the wheeling and dealing side of the wrestling biz.

The theme of control runs throughout the film — from McMahon, who wields the biggest stick in the business, to the physical control the wrestlers must exercise in the ring to avoid grievous bodily injury. Sadly though,
Beyond the Mat
illustrates the lack of control most of these guys have in their personal lives and careers. One former king of the ring, Jake “The Snake” Roberts comes across like a car wreck; you don't want to watch, but can't take your eyes off him. Blaustein unblinkingly shows his fall from the height of wrestling fame to a crack-smoking shell of a man who can't even stay off the pipe long enough to give an interview. It is heart-wrenching material, but further illustrates the toll that fame in the pro wrestling circuit can extract.

Veteran fighter Terry Funk fares better, yet inspires pity when the viewer realizes the physical anguish he suffers every time he steps into the squared circle. His left knee is damaged to the point where it barely functions, but he continues to wrestle, perhaps drawn by the fame, or maybe, feeling the weight of his golden shackles, he can't afford to quit.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is Mick “Mankind” Foley, who comes across as a nice man in an incredibly violent occupation. Scenes of him playing with his kids, the picture of normalcy, are juxtaposed with excerpts from his fights. Blaustein marries the two contradictory elements of Foley's life — family man and wrestler — in a potent segment that shows the dismayed reaction of his wife and kids at the Royal Rumble, a no-holds-barred match against The Rock.

I'm not a wrestling fan, but I was swayed by Blaustein's obvious passion for the subject.
Beyond the Mat
opened my eyes, forcing me to look past the manufactured personas that grimace and talk trash from ringside, and see the real people behind the muscles and sweat. There is real emotion here, outside the rage and showmanship usually associated with wrestling. For the first time we see these fighters not as cartoon characters, but as real people dealing with the effects of their job on their health and families.
Beyond the Mat
should be placed alongside
Pumping Iron
and
When We Were Kings
as movies that reveal the personal side of sports entertainment.

We all know wrestling is fake, but after seeing
Beyond the Mat
, it seems a little more real.

This is one of the most unlikely major studio efforts of the early '70s. Co-screenwriter (and future Pulitzer winner) Roger Ebert remembers the production of
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
as “a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum.”

In 1968, sexploitation pioneer Russ Meyer signed a three-picture deal with 20th Century Fox, based on the strength of the critical and commercial success of
Vixen
, an independent nudie set in a Canadian mountain resort. The first of these projects was a sequel to the trashy screen adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's novel
Valley of the Dolls
. Ebert and Meyers banged out the screenplay in just six weeks, not even taking the time to read the original book. The result is a trippy story about three young female musicians — Kelly (May '66 Playmate Dolly Reed), Casey (December '68 Playmate Cynthia Myers) and Pat (super-model Marcia McBroom) — who try to make it big in Hollywood.

After hooking up with Kelly's funky Aunt Susan (Phyliss Davis) and her friend, rock impresario Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell (John Lazar), the girls become embroiled in the trappings of late '60s swinging lifestyle — sex, violence, and drugs. At a wild orgy at Z-Man's groovy Los Angeles pad, the band (and the audience) get acquainted with the sexual habits and individual excesses of the party-goers and “super-octane girls who are old at 20.” The mysterious Z-Man provides a color commentary, uttering the famous line, “It's my happening baby, and it freaks me out,” a quote later co-opted by Mike Myers in the first Austin Powers film. Despite the fact that the band's only other gig was at a senior prom, Z-Man offers the band a contract, gives them the name The Carrie Nations and they score several hits including
Talkin' Candy Man
and
Look on up at the Bottom
. This is, however, a morality tale, and even though the hits keep coming, things turn sour for the band, and each member experiences an ethical lesson amid the decadence and betrayals. A surprise twist at the end is confusing, largely because the filmmakers were making this up as they went along and apparently didn't bother to rework earlier scenes.

Ebert was a neophyte screenwriter at the time who lacked the experience to pen a coherent script, although film buffs will note that he is probably the only Pulitzer Prize winner to write a skin flick. “The story is such a labyrinthine juggling act,” Ebert wrote in
Film Threat
, “that resolving it took a quadruple murder, a narrative summary, a triple wedding, and an epilogue.” Looking back at the film today Ebert admits that the movie has a “curious tone.”

Meyers ran the show on-set, and the personality of the rough and tumble former World War II newsreel cameraman intimidated the actors so much they couldn't work up the courage to ask whether or not they should play this material for laughs. “If the actors perform as if they know they have funny lines,” said Meyer, “it won't work.” As a result some ridiculous dialogue is given very strange line readings, lending a pseudo-serious feel to
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
that helped turn it into a camp classic.

Viewed today, the movie seems like a time capsule back into what was considered cool in the late '60s, except that they didn't get it quite right. Meyers was too old to be involved in the Summer of Love, and Ebert seems to have only heard about free love from reading a
Time
magazine exposé. The wild scenes in the movie are a caricature of '60s speech and behavior, kind of like the beatniks on
The Beverly Hillbillies
or any other mainstream late-'60s fare that was trying to come to grips with the counter-culture. (Ebert and Meyer could have used a class or two at Jethro Bodine's “Cool School” before setting out to make this picture.) Z-Man is saddled with most of the outrageous dialogue. I can only imagine how difficult it was to deliver a line like, “You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance,” without busting a gut. To compensate, Meyer simply upped the ante by doing what he knew best, adding beautifully robust naked women into the clichéd mix.

Despite credibility problems, Meyer does hit the mark satirically. The unruly structure (intentional or not) lends a certain manic energy to the movie that echoes the pill poppin' culture he was trying to parody. Have you ever tried to follow a long, involved story told by a really high person? It makes about as much sense as this film does. The film is best watched as a series of wacky set pieces, strung together with scenes of sex and violence to make a whole. Watch for Pam Grier in her first on-screen role as a party-goer, and some delicious '60s psychedelia from one-hit wonders The Strawberry Alarm Clock, who perform their 1967 chart topper “Incense and Peppermints.”

Big Bad Love
is a surreal movie based on a short story collection by Mississippi writer Larry Brown. “A book and a film have as much to do with each other as a turkey does to a sandwich,” says Arliss Howard in the press notes for the film. “Once the bread is involved, it is no longer turkey, it is a sandwich; and if you make turkey salad, it is something else again, and if you add mayo, humus, lettuce, salsa, if you broil it, slice it, well the idea is in there somewhere, and it gets more confusing if you see a wild turkey take flight, more so if you are walking with a three-year-old. What I mean to say is that Larry Brown understood this, having adapted his own work for the stage and screen.”

That quote sums up the feel of the movie — tangential, and just a bit off-center. Arliss Howard directs and stars as Vietnam vet Leon Barlow, a drunken writer struggling to piece together the broken shards of his life, turning his personal experiences into deeply felt fiction. As the rejected manuscripts pile up around him, he must also deal with the demands of his ex-wife (Debra Winger), his children, and his war buddy and only friend (Paul LeMat). He's a self-centered man who struggles to balance his creative life — a need to write — with the wants and needs of those in his life. Even after catching up on his child support and alimony, and earning a weekend with his kids, he is left feeling empty and saddened with his ex-wife's lack of caring. His internal tussles, coupled with a mother (Angie Dickenson) who regards him as a disappointment and a personal tragedy, cause him to spiral downward.

Leon is a failure on almost every level — certainly personally and professionally — and Howard doesn't shy away from his protagonist's shortcomings. In one heartbreaking scene he has a drunken Barlow watch his wedding video — backwards. In the beginning we see him and Marilyn kissing and hugging, and as the film slowly reverses through the ceremony we see him waiting at the altar, and then wandering through the graveyard by the church. The way he sees it, even on “the happiest day of his life” he still wound up alone.

The movie is (Howard's real-life wife) Debra Winger's return to film after an absence of six years, and serves as a reminder of what a skilled screen actress she is. Her portrayal of Marilyn is as memorable when she is speaking as it is when she is still. In one scene she tells Barlow, “I went out to collect the laundry and I just couldn't make it. I'm too tired. I'm just lying here listening to the rain.” The camera lingers on her face after the dialogue, and the look on her face is one of a woman at the end of her rope. In her silence we learn more about her character than we do in anything she says.

Big Bad Love
is a meandering, surreal (check out the cow with the typewriter) look at the creative process, and how one man messed up his life. “Someone asked me what the movie is about,” says Howard. “I said ‘birth, death, love, work, friendship . . . pick 'em.' And trains.” It's a well-crafted directorial debut from Howard who handles this quiet tale of an artist's redemption with a firm hand.