The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

Posted on September 14, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

A common reference point for teenage boys everywhere, The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) launched the cinematic careers of “ZAZ” (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker) and helped establish young John Landis as a comedy director of note. In three years ZAZ would make Airplane! (1980), a benchmark of 80’s comedy that would lead, in turn, to the television series Police Squad! (1982), Top Secret! (1984), and The Naked Gun (1988). Not bad for three boys from UW-Madison. Landis, meanwhile, would film Animal House in 1978 and graduate immediately to the big leagues. The Kentucky Fried Movie looks every cent of its very low budget, but over the decades it’s held its own as a cult classic while its creators went on to bigger and better things.

"If you're a Gemini like me, you can expect the unexpected."

The Kentucky Fried Theater was a comedy group ZAZ had formed in 1971 while attending the UW; Dick Chudnow completed the cast. Rich Markey, an early KFT fan, indicates the creation of the sketch group was inevitable given the students’ penchant for street theater: “For example…Abrahams would wrap his foot in bandages to resemble a cast, and hobble into a study room with an armful of books. When Abrahams arrived, Chudnow got up to leave, and as he passed Abrahams, he kicked the cane out from under him and down he went — splat! Books everywhere. Chudnow would grab the cane and whack Abrahams with it a few times and then run… Once, a couple of outraged students chased after Chudnow all the way out into the street.” Their knack for comic inspiration led to the formation of the KFT, a multi-media sketch show which performed in various venues across Madison (including the old Union South, which has just been rebuilt) before transporting itself to Los Angeles in 1972. There, they inadvertently helped inspire the creation of Saturday Night Live when Lorne Michaels witnessed a show; they also performed their “Fried Egg” routine on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Dick Chudnow left the group, stating that all the attention was making him “uncomfortable,” and sold the rights to his KFT material to ZAZ. But Abrahams and the Zuckers had stars in their eyes; if they could get a feature film made, their material would reach a much wider audience.

Catholic School Girls in Trouble

John Landis had been actively working in Hollywood for several years, beginning his career in the mail room at 20th Century Fox and quickly climbing up through the ranks. With some friends he had made the B-movie send-up Schlock (1973), which featured future Oscar-winner Rick Baker in a gorilla suit, and gained some favorable notices but didn’t exactly light up the box office. In an interview in the Fall 1973 Cinefantastique, Landis confidently talked up his next projects: “One is called An American Werewolf in Paris, which is very funny and very frightening. Teenage Vampire is another one. I’ve always wanted to make Island of Dr. Moreau since I was four, and I intend to; also A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” Though he’d eventually make that first project (with a change in locale), Schlock wasn’t the calling card he’d hoped it would be, and he languished as a script doctor and production assistant. It would be another four years before he teamed up with ZAZ, and by this point, they needed each other. The Kentucky Fried Movie would take the best of the sketch team’s live material with some new, more cinema-friendly parodies thrown in. It was good timing: SNL was by now popularizing irreverent, adult-oriented sketch comedy, and a few R-rated sketch films were beginning to appear at the box office, movies like The Groove Tube (1974), Tunnelvision (1976), and American Raspberry (1977). There was room for ZAZ and Landis to offer their own take, and certainly plenty of opportunity to improve on what had been a pretty dismal subgenre thus far.

"High Adventure": an interviewer (Joe Medalis), his subject (Barry Dennen), and their boom mic.

I might quibble about The Kentucky Fried Movie. I might suggest that some of the jokes are too stupid, or too immature. Or that the film could be given a stronger internal logic (is the viewer supposedly watching this lineup on late-night television, or in a movie theater?). Or that some of the segments might be rearranged for more impact – for example, one sketch involving a man being physically slapped about and abused (“Feel-Around”) shouldn’t be followed immediately by a commercial parody in which the same thing happens (“Nytex P.M.”). Except that these really are quibbles, and, unlike its forebears (with the exception of the Monty Python films, and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, which had the benefit of Woody Allen’s wit), the movie hits more often than it misses. It’s funny. That’s all that matters. The ZAZ style is to tell very dumb jokes, but relentlessly; to hammer away at them until you surrender. Be honest with yourself: “Don’t call me Shirley” is not particularly hilarious. That is, unless Peter Graves is delivering the line, and without any trace of a smile. The Kentucky Fried Movie injures the dignity of more respectable actors: the chaotic and overstuffed disaster movie trailer “That’s Armageddon” features former 007 George Lazenby trapped in an infinitely repeating page of circular dialogue, from which there is no escape (“What are you saying?”), and Donald Sutherland plays the “clumsy waiter” (he falls into a cake – that’s it). In “Courtroom,” Tony Dow reprises his role as Leave it to Beaver‘s Wally, looking exactly the same, while he sincerely delivers his dopey lines to a perfectly-cast Jerry Zucker as the Beav. When the witness breaks into tears, Beaver stammers, “You wouldn’t cry if you was just gettin’ yelled at, would ya, Wally?” “Heck no, Beav. Girls are different. I mean, if a guy cried, everybody would think he was a creep or somethin’.”

"Courtroom" - Jim Abrahams narrates a tense trial.

Landis indulges the film’s R-rating with “Catholic School Girls in Trouble,” a parody of every sexploitation and porno of the 70’s. The actresses are given wink-wink names such as Linda Chambers and Nancy Reems. The famously-endowed Uschi Digard (of Russ Meyer’s Supervixens) plays “The Woman in the Shower,” and if you have seen this film, I’m betting that you remember her brief role. Landis also throws in a dwarf in a clown outfit whipping some girls chained up in a dungeon, just to cover the bases. This is a film made for in-jokes, and naturally Landis’s fictional “See You Next Wednesday” (taken from a line in 2001: A Space Odyssey) appears on a marquee; you’ll see more of the film in An American Werewolf in London (1981). A poster for Schlock is hanging in the lobby. Landis, a movie junkie, really seems more at home with the film parodies, such as the whimsical “Cleopatra Schwartz,” in which a scantily-clad Pam Grier lookalike (Marilyn Joi), outfitted with heavy artillery, weds an Orthodox Jew (Saul Kahan). But the film’s singular triumph is “A Fistful of Yen,” the sustained Enter the Dragon parody which fills out about half of The Kentucky Fried Movie‘s running time.

"A Fistful of Yen" - Evan Kim as Loo

Evan Kim plays Loo, applying (and only slightly exaggerating) Bruce Lee’s speech impediment, as well as a fair imitation of his martial arts skills. Ironically, he’s probably the best of the Lee imitators that followed in the wake of the actor’s death in 1973; the preponderance of rip-offs was still glutting theaters by the time this film was released. But Evan Kim doesn’t just look the part; seldom noted is just how perfect his comic timing is – and how good he looks in Dorothy Gale pigtails. Abrahams and the Zuckers write a script so close to Enter the Dragon that it often directly borrows that film’s dialogue, just to pick it apart and skewer it (“these people are drunk, and don’t know where they are”). As the one-handed Dr. Klahn, Master Bong Soo Han looks almost exactly like Kien Shih’s “Han” of the original film. It’s difficult to parody that character, considering how ridiculous it was in the first place (most of his various instruments of death, and the skeleton hand in a jar, all originate in Enter the Dragon). But simple touches like repeating the villain’s unintentional rhyme of “magnitude” and “gratitude,” or showing what his answering machine might be like, are inspired. For his part, Landis apes the style of Hong Kong martial arts films, with zooms, slow-motion, and extreme close-ups of intense-looking stares; the perfect compliment to his writers’ non sequitur gags, including a kung fu match-up which devolves, somehow, into a Love Connection parody.

"A Fistful of Yen": Careful, the room might be bugged.

Whatever my ineffectual quibbles about the arrangement of the sketches, “A Fistful of Yen” is placed perfectly in the center of the film, so that you get a break from the local news, TV commercial, and movie trailer spoofs, which would be an overload if filling out the full 90 minutes. It gives a chance to relax into a narrative, if an absurd one; and it provides such rewards that Airplane!, which applies the same treatment to the Airport films, is a natural evolution. Finally, The Kentucky Fried Movie serves up a sketch from their live show: some sexual activity in the living room is so heated that it begins to distract the anchorman on the television. Did I mention that this film is a favorite of teenage boys across the United States? Some more gratuitous T&A is served, and a novel but simple gag that leads to a very literal climax for the film. I’m sure the pun is intentional. If you haven’t learned by now, the Zuckers and Abrahams weren’t above that sort of thing; and we should all be glad for it.

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Disneyland: “Man and the Moon” (1955)

Posted on September 12, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Walt Disney opened his Disneyland theme park on July 18, 1955, in Anaheim, California – just thirty-two miles from Hollywood. Disney had conquered cinema already, and now he had his sights set on a multi-media entertainment empire. In October of that year he premiered his television series on the ABC network, at first called Disneyland, in honor (and cross-promotion) of the park; it would later become Walt Disney Presents and, eventually, The Wonderful World of Disney. Through its various permutations, the anthology program would spotlight Disney animated shorts and films, made-for-TV movies, nature documentaries, behind-the-scenes specials on the Disney theme parks, Davy Crockett episodes and more. In the show’s earliest days, each week would present a theme program inspired by a particular section of Disneyland: Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland, and, most intriguingly, Tomorrowland, which gave Disney the license to produce an hour of science-fact entertainment, and educate viewers on the solar system and the future of space exploration. These big-budget productions brought in Wernher von Braun as both a consultant and an on-screen personality.

Wernher von Braun discusses a proposal for a space station with artificial gravity in "Man and the Moon"

Von Braun first came to America through the efforts of Harry Truman’s “Operation Paperclip,” enacted in the wake of WWII to acquire Germany’s talent before they were scooped up by other Allied powers. Paperclip was to recruit those German scientists and engineers who represented the country’s best and brightest, with the stated exclusion of members of the Nazi party. Some exceptions were made. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency falsified a biography for Nazi Germany’s eminent rocket scientist von Braun, and did the same for many others, to guarantee that the American military was receiving the cream of the crop regardless of their involvement with Hitler’s plans. It would not be part of von Braun’s record, for example, that he had been recruited by Himmler to join the SS, and that his work on the V-2 rocket was aided by slave labor picked out of concentration camps; it’s estimated that over 25,000 died by the brutal treatment in the industrial complexes at Mittelbau. (Von Braun later claimed that he had no choice but to join the SS, and to use the slave labor he was given, in order to continue his research.) In the United States, von Braun gradually rose to prominence as part of the American rocket program, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, and his well-publicized idea that space travel was close to becoming reality was instrumental in launching the “space race.” He proposed detailed outlines for the construction of a space station and a voyage to Mars. When NASA was established in 1958, he joined as Director.

Walt Disney describes "Tomorrowland" in his introduction to "Man and the Moon"

Walt Disney was drawn to von Braun’s very big ideas. He saw a fellow dreamer, a futurist who wanted to see his vast, almost Utopian dreams accomplished within his own lifetime. Disney proposed three hour-long “Tomorrowland” television specials for his Disneyland series which would outline von Braun’s plans for space travel and then realize those concepts through animation and live-action science fiction sequences. He needed one more element, another dreamer with a prodigious imagination, someone capable of assembling his and von Braun’s ideas into tightly-constructed episodes of pure entertainment: that man was Ward Kimball. He was one of Disney’s reliable “Nine Old Men,” the animators who had overseen his classic animated films, and whose style and innovative techniques had immeasurably redefined the standards for cinematic animation. Kimball was the animator of Jiminy Crickett and some of the most memorable characters of 1951’s Alice in Wonderland (the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee). He professed to know nothing about space or space travel, but was asked to write, direct, and produce all three of the Tomorrowland episodes Disney initially envisioned: these would be “Man in Space,” “Man and the Moon,” and “Mars and Beyond.” Kimball plunged into research with von Braun’s assistance, and emerged with three striking and unconventional hours of early television.

Animator Ward Kimball, director, producer, and co-writer of "Man and the Moon"

“Man and the Moon” debuted on December 28, 1955. After Walt Disney’s personalized and standard introduction, Ward Kimball himself arrives to present the program he and his team of researchers and animators have assembled. (He looks a bit like Elisha Cook Jr.) He leans forward into a microphone and announces, “Roll the moon sequence, please.” This first segment is the token Disney animated short, the highlight of each of the Tomorrowland programs. If you think of Disney’s shorts (with Mickey and company) as saccharine and toothless, Kimball’s work is a revelation: heavily stylized, constantly imaginative, filled with visual gags, puns, and artistic and literary references, and much more in line with Chuck Jones’ Looney Tunes for Warner Bros. At fifteen minutes, the animated film takes up a good chunk of the episode’s running time, but it holds your attention throughout, detailing the history of man’s fascination with the Moon, and its influence upon various cultures, through art, novels, proverbs, and song. As we’re told what “primitive man,” the Hindus, the Aegeans, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Greeks, and the Romans thought of the Moon, the animation style adapts as appropriate. We learn of the earliest science fiction stories portraying journeys to the Moon, and we’re told that in the Dark Ages, “for centuries the light of knowledge was extinguished, and only a fleeting mention of the Moon was made,” which Kimball illustrates by showing a black-cloaked soothsayer murmuring: “Moon.” Dark times indeed.

"The Dark Ages," as seen by Ward Kimball's animators

We see Johannes Kepler’s lunar fantasy novel Somnium reenacted, with Kepler kidnapped by “moon demons” and carried across the Moon’s shadow where he meets a one-eyed, spindly-legged moon creature. Only a few feet apart, they gaze at one another intently through telescopes. We see Cyrano de Bergerac attempt a journey to the Moon, but ending up in Canada, spouting random French phrases at the Indians (“Soupe du jour!” “Pepe le moko?” “Filet mignon!”). Romeo & Juliet and Othello opine about the Moon on the stage. Also illustrated is the “Great Moon Hoax,” the astronomer John Herschel’s reports of seeing lunar life through his telescope, and his visions are animated using Victorian-style (and Dali-esque) cut-outs that anticipate the animations of Terry Gilliam over a decade later.

"The Great Moon Hoax" as animated by Ward Kimball (click to enlarge)

Ward Kimball’s film ends with a song, “Ah! See the Moon,” which frantically recites Moon rhymes, and flips through animated scenes so quickly that it’s as though Kimball instructed his team to use up every single idea in their sketchbooks, squeezing them all into the last minutes of the short. Then our director returns in the flesh to explain the phases of the moon, the influence upon tides, and finally the landscape and geology of the Moon itself. It might be elementary, but it’s illustrated so neatly, using models and animation, that it would still be a useful teaching tool in a contemporary science class. From fact we move to speculation, and Wernher von Braun arrives to explain, with his thick German accent, how he believes space travel will be accomplished in the coming years. He describes how a trip to the Moon could be made possible by constructing a refueling station in space – a “space station,” if you will, which is shown as a large, wheel-shaped model, and a cut-away diagram of the structure’s interior which helpfully spins in rotation under his guiding hand. This spinning would accomplish an artificial gravity for the astronauts inside: a concept which Arthur C. Clarke would pursue time and again in his novels, most famously in his screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Kubrick, who exhaustively researched his film, built something not dissimilar to von Braun’s plans full scale, to give the illusion of Keir Dullea running along the vertical circumference of a 360-degree track.

"Moonship RM-1" journeys to the Moon

Following von Braun’s mini-lecture, the remainder of the hour is given over to a “science-factual” narrative, a cinematic equivalent to the Disneyland ride “Rocket to the Moon,” and founded upon the concepts which the rocket scientist just showed us. For this segment, Disney commissioned the construction of models of the Moon, the “R-M” rocketship, and the space station, plus interiors decorated with flashing buttons, levers, and consoles, with actors hired to wear suits and helmets that make them look not unlike Lego astronauts. When an astronaut travels from the “moonship” to the space station, his spacesuit is a multi-limbed pod which is best described as a flying ice cream cone: von Braun’s conception. They deal with a fuel leak in one of the rocket’s tanks, and (a bit tediously) deliver techno-babble while the musical score thunders on dramatically. Essentially it’s a small-screen version of films like Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M (1950), and Project Moon Base (1953), but with superior special effects, and certainly better research. Consider that all this expense was for one segment of one hour of television programming – with no DVD sales to fall back on to recoup the investment – and it’s doubly impressive. You can easily imagine that this would be terrifically compelling to audiences of 1955.

The RM-1 corrects its course to avoid a collision with the Moon.

The entire episode is leading to one moment which is pure 50’s SF nirvana. As the RM-1 travels to the “unknown side of the Moon,” aka the dark side, the ship is plunged into shadow and darkness. The captain shouts, “Okay, Frank! Fire your flares at three-minute intervals!” An animated flare arcs above the lunar surface, and the unexplored, heretofore unseen craters and seas are briefly exposed by a flash of light. Considering that we were still more than a decade away from reaching the Moon, these close-ups of the (model’s) surface look astonishingly close to real documentary footage. Then the ship’s crew discovers a high degree of radioactivity from one of the hidden areas; the “contour mapper” also reports some strange formations. The captain commands: “Get some flares in that area, quick!” Another animated flare is fired, and we see: what? A carved formation upon the rocks? A “Chariots of the Gods”-style message? A Selenite city? The viewers of 1955 only get a brief glimpse before the flare goes out; no option to rewind their Tivo.

Something is hidden on the dark side of the Moon.

As the rocketship prepares its homeward voyage, a narrator tells us the next goal is to uncover the mysteries of “The Red Planet Mars!” (An umbrella-shaped ship called the MARS 1 is shown drifting into the blackness of space.) This, in fact, would be the subject of the next “Tomorrowland” program, “Mars and Beyond.” We knew even less about Mars than we did the Moon back then, so Ward Kimball would be given a greater license to let his animators chase their imaginations to wild extremes. Von Braun was also game, and, judging by the stellar ratings, so was the American audience, who had been given a taste of optimism amidst the deep freeze of the Cold War…

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Okay, Let’s Try This…

Posted on September 11, 2011 at 2:13 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

You may have noticed, if you check in here at all, that beginning in the summer I began to ramp up the amount of material posted on this still-developing website. It’s a challenge for one person to provide so much content, particularly when said fellow has a daily (paying) job to contend with, and my fear is that overambition takes a toll on the quality of the pieces posted here.

So, beginning Monday the 12th, a slight refocusing of Midnight Only: I’ll provide three posts a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) rather than five, but hopefully you will find them to be three posts of substance, reliably available when you expect them. By the end of this week, you might have a better idea of the angle I’m going for, and my intent for this website in general. Granted, the web is overpopulated with movie blogs, but I hope you find something a little different to enjoy here.

October will be an all-horror film month. I’ll be wrapping up the series on William Castle soon (I’ll loop back around and cover The House on Haunted Hill to finish that series out), and then launch a new survey of the Euro-fantastique cinema of Jean Rollin. Stick around, and thanks for reading.

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