My Year of Flops (11 page)

The last and perhaps most potent weapon in the counterculture's arsenal was the ripe sexuality of sexy hippie chicks, Manic Pixie Dream Girls whose spacey smiles and lithe young bodies promised to liberate brooding depressives from the grim realities of the workaday world. In
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
and darker squares-meet-the-counterculture films like
Save The Tiger
and
Joe,
hippie Eves lead establishment Adams into a world of sex and toking.
Skidoo,
having
already traumatized audiences with the image of Carol Channing in her underwear, thankfully gives protagonist Jackie Gleason a spiritual awakening instead of a sexual one. Nobody wanted to see Gleason's flabby Irish belly slapping angrily against some stoned little minx, including Gleason himself.

The more you know about the brilliant, mercurial, wildly controversial Otto Preminger—scion of one of Austria-Hungary's most prominent families and one of the most feared figures in American film—the more poignant
Skidoo
becomes. In a strange way, Preminger lived the movie; he dropped acid, collaborated with scruffy, long-haired countercultural types, and tried his damnedest to plug into the spirit of open-mindedness sweeping the country.

A successful director, producer, and part-time comic book villain—he played Mr. Freeze in the '60s TV
Batman
—Preminger wasn't about to throw it all away to live in a VW van and follow the Grateful Dead, but he clearly admired the hippie mind-set and the Black Panthers' brash rebelliousness. (Preminger's flirtation with Black Power is cruelly, though cleverly, chronicled in Tom Wolfe's classic article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's.”) But casting off the shackles of the establishment and embracing hippiedom isn't as easy as it seems.

It's no surprise that Preminger couldn't convincingly connect with the hippie mentality in spite of the best intentions. The film's cast reflected the violent conflict between Preminger's jones for capturing youth culture and his old-school aesthetic. To make the ultimate hippie acid film, Preminger apparently scoured the nursing homes of Hollywood to find the perfect cast for his suspiciously geriatric cinematic love-in. I suspect he posted flyers inscribed with the following words in retirement home rec rooms:

The posters yielded instant results: In addition to Jackie Gleason and a 77-year-old Groucho Marx, Preminger scored supporting roles for such young people's favorites as Arnold Stang, Mickey Rooney, George Raft, Peter Lawford, Slim Pickens, and Preminger's fellow
Batman
villains Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, and Burgess Meredith. And don't forget Carol Channing. Can't make a counterculture movie without Carol Channing.

In
Skidoo,
low-level hood gone straight “Tough Tony” Banks (Gleason) and his sidekick (Stang) spy on Tough Tony's flower-child daughter (Alexandra Hay) in a car with a hippie played by John Phillip Law, who looks like a cross between Tonto and Jesus, and communicates through Zen koans like, “If you can't dig nothing, then you can't dig anything, you dig?” Sitar noodling accompanies his stoned musings; apparently if you smoked pot in the '60s, an invisible sitar player followed you around providing mood music.

Our corpulent hero soon has more to worry about than his daughter's shaggy paramour when another mobster (Romero) tells him he's being called out of retirement to kill an imprisoned numbers man (Mickey Rooney) who plans to rat on enigmatic mob kingpin “God” (Marx). Tony is reluctant to kill (or “kiss,” in the film's terminology) his best friend, but when his sidekick catches a bullet in the forehead, he realizes that he has no choice in the matter: It's an order, not a suggestion. While Tony glumly sets about executing his new assignment in Alcatraz, his daughter begins living the hippie nightmare: being stripped, then body-painted in a smelly van while spacey hippies sing old folk songs while toking and staring glumly at nothing in particular.

In prison, Tony meets his cellmates: a recidivist bookworm rapist (Michael Constantine) and Fred the Professor, a floppy-haired, walrus-mustache-sporting draft dodger played by Austin Pendleton, who steals the film with his loopy line readings and daft sweetness. He's the heart and soul, a gentle man in a cruel, impersonal, technology-crazed, fully automated world.

Speaking of fully automated and technology-crazed: Channing's
Flo Banks, decked out in canary yellow and feathers so she looks disconcertingly like a drag queen Big Bird, decides to seduce low-level mob flunky Angie (Frankie Avalon) into revealing the whereabouts of her AWOL husband. She attempts this in his tricked-out bachelor pad, a technological utopia/dystopia where everything is managed by remote control.

The film then unleashes a horror beyond words, beyond reason, beyond even madness: 46-year-old Carol Channing, stripped down to her bright yellow underwear, writhing suggestively on Angie's bed.

Skidoo
suffers from a surplus rather than a dearth of ideas. It just needs a strong authorial voice to marshal all those weird notions and trippy conceits into a strong, cohesive whole. Take this example: While licking a piece of Fred's “special” stationery, Tony ends up accidentally ingesting LSD. The history of LSD freak-outs on film is long and painful. Taking LSD is a powerful, ineffable experience. It's hard to put into words, and even harder to render cinematically, so filmmakers resort to hokey surrealism, rinky-dink special effects, cheap camera tricks, over- and underexposed film, and other hackneyed attempts to capture the uncapturable.

Preminger was no exception. After Tony mistakenly drops acid, two characters shrink to munchkin size. He then begins seeing scarlet triangular orbs, disembodied eyeballs, guns, strange numbers written in bullet holes, and climactically, the floating disembodied head of God atop a screw. It's kitschy psychedelia-for-beginners as a bug-eyed Tony sweats his way to an epiphany: His daughter isn't really his daughter, and he's okay with that, having lost his ego at the behest of kindly spiritual guide Fred the Professor and LSD.

Skidoo
is essentially about one man's liberation through mind-expanding psychedelics, yet pre- and post-LSD, Tony appears borderline suicidal. Gleason was going through a vicious depression when he shot
Skidoo,
and collaborating with a ruthless, glowering tyrant like Preminger—who tellingly had a lucrative sideline playing Nazis on stage and in film, most notably in
Stalag 17
—did little to improve his disposition.

In a film all about squares and freaks coming together in acid-and-weed-saturated bliss, Channing's character becomes the great uniter. Flo instantly
gets
the hippies. She doesn't need to drop acid to see the interconnectedness of all mankind. That's what makes her such a freak. Also strangely beautiful—but mainly a freak.

Skidoo
ends the way it must: with Flo, inexplicably dressed as George Washington, singing the theme song and gyrating creepily like a marionette while leading a hippie armada of guitar-toting freaks onto Marx's floating fortress of uptightitude. With Tony's homemade hot-air balloon arriving on board the ship at the exact same moment. And with Tony and Flo celebrating their reunion by making sweet, sweet love (thankfully off-camera), thereby rendering everything perfect forever.

In the movie's groovy, generous world, even the bad guy gets away scot-free: The film ends with Fred the Professor and God in guru robes, sharing a joint and a wavelength as they sail off into their next epic trip.

Watching
Skidoo
for the third time—Christ, I really am a pop-culture masochist—I warmed to it not necessarily for what it is but rather for what it tries to be and what it could have been. In his biography
Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King,
Foster Hirsch praises the film for its non-judgmental portrayal of the '60s counterculture. In Preminger's open, sweetly misguided film, hippies aren't just smarter, more spiritually attuned, and happier than everyone else, they're also more patriotic. The idea that hippies might just be better Americans than flag-waving cultural troglodytes like Tony is sneakily subversive and strangely winning. Preminger's celebration of a subculture he admired but didn't begin to understand serves as a singular time capsule of a time, place, and cultural divide that has only grown greater in the ensuing four decades.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Austin Pendleton On Skidoo

Austin Pendleton is one of those delightful character actors who elevate everything they appear in. The elfin Tony-nominated actor, playwright, and director has appeared in more than 40 films, including
Catch-22, What's Up, Doc?, The Front Page, The Muppet Movie,
and
My Cousin Vinny
in addition to his extensive work in the theater.

Austin Pendleton:
The original screenplay the film was developed from was written by a guy I knew slightly in New York named Bill Cannon. He had written this movie called
Brewster McCloud
. He had seen me in a play and he had wanted me to play Brewster McCloud. It was in the early days of independent film. It was in the mid-'60s, I'd say. I read it and I loved it. I thought it was terrific and an incredible part. I couldn't believe it, because I had never been in a movie. So I said, “Great! I'll do this.” But then he couldn't get it on. He couldn't get it produced at the time though it was ultimately made by Robert Altman.

So then he called me up, and he's like, “I've written a more commercial screenplay called
Skidoo,
and I've written a supporting part for you in that. So hopefully it'll be easier to get
Skidoo
made, and we'll attract some names for a couple of the lead roles, and you'll be really good in this supporting role, so then we can get
Brewster McCloud
made.” And I said, “Well that's sweet of you.” [Laughs.]
Skidoo
was like the
Brewster McCloud
screenplay: It was very '60s and very fragmented and the product of someone very, very talented. So then Bill called me one day and said, “I've sold
Skidoo
!” I said, “Great, dude. To who?” I thought it would be like early Brian De Palma.

Nathan Rabin:
Or a Peter Fonda type.

AP:
He said, “Otto Preminger.” I said, “Have you lost your mind?” At that time and always since, I have been a fan of Otto Preminger's, but he's the last director I would think of for a thing like this. And he said, “Oh no, he's very excited about it.” He'd shown Otto the
Brewster McCloud
script, and that would have been even more strange. He'd quoted Otto and did an imitation and said [Adopts Austrian accent:]
“I like
Brewster,
but I like better your
Skidoo
.” So then Bill told Otto, “Okay, but I want you to put this actor named Austin Pendleton in it.” Otto tried to get me for a three-picture deal, and I told my agent, “I'm not going to do that.” I don't know what I missed doing, but I said, “I'm not going to be tied down.” I wish I had gotten a three-picture deal, as it happens, but anyway …

So I went out there and we began to shoot on the location, which was on the sound stage at Paramount, where all the prison scenes were shot. As I say, it was the first time I'd been in a part of any significance in a movie at all, and the technique of it, I just couldn't get hold of. I would miss my marks, I was incredibly self-conscious, and Otto kept being pleased with it. I didn't have a car, I was staying at a motel, at a place called the Players Motel, from which you could walk to Paramount. It was a hotel run for alcoholic actors, run by a couple of old actors who were themselves in AA. So the atmosphere around the pool was really depressing.