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By Patrick Keller
July 16, 2004
HISTORY GONE BAD
There are entire museums devoted to troll dolls, Pez dispensers and portraits of famous people made with toast. (In New York City, Burlingame, California, and New Zealand respectively. You cannot make this stuff up.) We have, as a society, accumulated entire bookshelves consisting of nothing more than alien abduction stories, and somehow we have yet to produce a single, even modestly comprehensive book on bad movies, unless you count all those glossy picture books devoted to Coreys Haim and Feldman, who, incidentally, have never been immortalized in any sort of bread product. How can this indignity be allowed to stand? (The bad movie thing, I mean. If someone wants to make a Haim bagel, go right ahead.)
With that academic shortage in mind I undertake this epic history of bad movies, which will most likely just reveal why the subject was so neglected in the first place. But that sort of thinking didn't stop Maurice "The Toastman" Bennett, so why should it stop me?
A History of Bad Movies I: The Silent Film Era
Or: "The Audience isn't Listening"
Thomas Edison invented motion pictures in the late 19th century, and bad movies were invented mere moments after. One of the earliest exhibited films, a short silent film of a train, literally saw patrons run screaming out the venue. By modern standards, there was no such thing as a plot to these early films. They were usually less than a minute long, and depicted such mundane events as a child netting a fish in a tank, a woman bicycling, or Thomas Edison giddily rolling around in large piles of bills.
| If you enjoyed the films of D.W. Griffith, you might also enjoy:
1. Being beaten senseless by thugs armed with baseball bats.
2. Extensive dental work performed by a blind amputee.
3. Spending time with David Duke.
4. Cher.
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In that innocent age, "amusement" was still considered a sin by the Church, so people instead had to rely on reading accounts of "our most be-loved Vice-President Thomas Andrew Hendricks ingurgitating a fosfated soda re-freshment" from the newspaper for entertainment. This may account for the unusually high suicide rates in those days, though we can't discount the lack of fluoride in the water, either.
Fortunately, shortly after the turn of the century, a few scientists in one of Edison's labs discovered something called "narrative" (the formula for which, sadly, was lost in the 80s) and modern film history began, though it was still in its infancy, by which I mean that it sat around and didn't do much, apart from producing a lot of crap. Still, it was like nothing audiences had ever seen, so they spent a good deal of time crowded around little baby theater, talking like complete idiots and occasionally tickling it.
To our modern eyes, these early silent films might seem boring and tedious, lacking any sense of proper editing, camera technique, or narrative style. And we would be completely correct: They were boring and tedious to audiences at the time as well. The difference was, people of the time believed boredom and tedium to be good, Christian values. Also, they were very, very stupid. Complete morons. Total mouth-breathers. Couldn't walk through an open doorway without detailed, written instructions, which they then had to have read to them by someone with a grade-school education.
Lucky for us, our European cousins were hard at work making dark, challenging films like THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, NOSFERATU: SYMPHONY OF TERROR, and BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, which Hollywood tried unsuccessfully to remake as CALIGARI'S CHEST OF DRAWERS, NOSFERATU: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO, and POTEMKIN STARSHIP, respectively.
The most popular American director of the time was David Llewelyn Wark Herbert Aloicious Francis Francis Francis Griffith, more popularly known as D. W. Griffith, or "Chuckles" to his friends. Very little is known about Griffith, except his entire life's story. What little we do know (and by "we" I mean "me") is that he was born in rural Kentucky, where he perfected a recipe for seasoning chicken. Foolishly, though, he abandoned the culinary arts to focus on filmmaking, where he developed a technique that enabled five minutes of celluloid to take up to two hours to project, which delighted American audiences desperate for more tedium, as well as European sadists and insomniacs.
Griffith perfected his time-stretching system in his groundbreaking 1915 work, THE BIRTH OF A NATION, the cheery tale of grown men who still like to play dress up, which was 160 minutes long but felt like a prison sentence. Reviewers at the time compared it to surgical anesthetic. Naturally, American audiences flocked to the film, seeing it as a surefire ticket into heaven. The director's next film, INTOLERANCE, a mere 190 minutes, actually hasn't finished unspooling in some theaters.
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The other famous director of the period was Charlie "Charles" Chaplin, known for his character "The Little Tramp Who Eats Live Babies," which was significantly toned down under pressure from the studio, who feared boycotts from the powerful anti-baby-eating contingent. In the five years following his cinematic debut, 1914's MAKING A LIVING (EATING BABIES), Chaplin starred in some 652 films in his Little Tramp guise -- among them, (EATING LIVE INFANTS) IN THE PARK, THE CHAMPION (TODDLER-DEVOURER), and BABIES: YUM!
Audiences were at first shocked by Chaplin's daring decision to make his films "entertaining," and, though initially fearful and cautious, learned to grudgingly accept "enjoyment" from their movies, although church leaders strictly forbade anyone but married couples to partake.
Fortunately for everyone, the Twenties and "Talkies" were just around the corner. Unfortunately, so were wars, the Great Depression, and Roger Corman...
Next Week: DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. (I promise.)
Movie Poop Shoot, its owners, editors, employees, lawyers, friends, family, people they met on the street, and their pets wish to make it known that they in no way endorse the eating of infants, regardless of what you might read in the papers. Those are bald-faced lies, and we intend to sue the pants off of anyone who suggests otherwise. Besides, it was just that one time, and we were drunk. And it was just half. Someone had already eaten the other half. What were we going to do, let a perfectly good infant torso go to waste?
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