King Shot (2009)

Mon Apr 13 06:55:11 CDT 2009

Hey Dave,

>From my stash and every bit as mad as you'd suppose...

First published May, 2007.

 ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY INTERVIEW –

 “Last night I dream of blind men,” says Alejandro Jodorowsky. “Twelve of
them had surrounded another blind man and were beating him. They surrounded
me but I said “I am not blind” so they leave me alone.”

  Say ‘hello’ to a true underground hero, a celebrated actor, playwright,
director, producer, composer, mime, graphic novelist, psychotherapist and
newsreader.

Born in 1929 in Chile to Russian-Jewish immigrants who owned a dry-goods
store, the young Jodorowsky would develop an interest in puppetry and mime
and found a theatre company that, at its peak, would employ 60 people. He
left for Paris, reportedly throwing his address book into the sea on the
way, to collaborate with Marcel Marceau on some of his most famous
mimeograms. Over the next few years, Jodorowsky would alternate between
working in Mexico City and in Paris, staging the playwrights who would be
major influences on his film career, including Samuel Beckett, Ionesco,
August Strindberg, Theatre of Cruelty champion Antonin Artaud and Spanish
playwright Fernando Arrabal, (with whom he launched the Panic Movement.)

    “I am like a diamond”, he laughs, “a stone with many faces. I have had a
family and written comics and done many things. I could leave film. But it
was good for me, very good.”

   For his first film project, he adapted the Arrabal play *Fando and
Lis,*which Jodorowsky had recently staged. The film, a tale of two
quarrelling
lovers looking for the magical city of Tar, was banned in Mexico after
starting a riot at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival.

  “Mexico was very conservative at that time,” he recalls. “I had to be
smuggled out of the screening. They were so offended by everything in the
film.”

  Happily, despite a life-threatening high-speed chase after the Acapulco
screening, he kept at it. Decades have passed since he became the patron
saint of New York’s hip midnight movie subculture and there are now so many
myths around the cult filmmaker I’ve been inclined to doubt his very
existence. Yet here he is in London, promoting the DVD release of *Holy
Mountain * and *El Topo, *his two ‘lost’ masterpieces.

  This, of course, is stupendous news for film fans. Though bootleg editions
of these peyote classics have long doubled as the Holy Grail for video store
brats, it’s been thirty years since Beatles’ manager Allen Klein withdrew
both titles from circulation.

  Details of the split between the director and Klein, who holds the
distribution rights, are now legendary. When John Lennon decided *El
Topo*was his favourite film, he convinced his manager to buy it.

Klein then produced *Holy Mountain, * the fantastically far-out follow-up.

“I owe John and Yoko a great deal”, says Jodorowsky in heavily accented
English. “I am an artist, not an industrial movie-maker. Art comes from deep
inside of your soul and is very, very difficult to distribute! When I came
to the United States with *El Topo *the big companies said, "We don't know
how to open that." It was impossible to show. Then one person (theatre owner
Ben Barenholtz) showed it to John Lennon and he liked it. So he showed it
with his picture made with Yoko Ono. It began to show at midnight, which
started midnight movies, pictures like *Pink Flamingos*. They called that
"Midnight Mass." After a year, Allen Klein bought the picture. John Lennon
recommended that I get the money to do whatever I want. Klein gave me a
million dollars. For me it was enormous amount.”

  Klein promptly withdrew the films when Jodorowsky refused to direct an
adaptation of Pauline Reage’s * The Story Of O.* Some accounts have it that
Klein hated *Holy Mountain*, but loved *El Topo *like a fine wine.

* “*I just did not want to make something sexual”, explains Jodorowsky. “I
am a feminist. When I made *El Topo* I was a South American * machista.* I
was a very, very angry person. I was a criminal. I had killed hundreds of
animals. But by the time I finished I was a very, very kind person. I had
come to realise what I was. And I was changing. That picture is a diary of
life for me at that time. When I finished the film I knew I was *El Topo*.
And I didn't want to make a picture about a woman who is a slave. I had to
escape. But Allen Klein had put together a big budget project. So he was
right to be angry.”

How on earth did this long-running feud come to an end, I wonder?

“ Ah listen”, he says. “The fight had lost it’s meaning long ago. I needed
some peace just for myself. I asked why? I started meditating to discover
where this hatred between us came from. And there was no reason. So I called
him up and asked him to sit down. ‘You’ve been spending money blocking each
other for years. What is the point?’ The years give you experience, you
know. In three minutes we were good friends again. We’re old men now.”

Determined to make things right, Klein flew Jodorowsky to New York to
remaster the films and record a director’s commentary. The resulting
package, on sale here this month, includes both titles and *Fando y
Lis*(1967), Jodorowsky’s astonishing feature film debut. It may be one
of the
most essential DVD bundles ever put together.

  Novices can thrill to the orgiastic spectacle of the conquest of Mexico
re-enacted by toads, parades of Amazon women, a Christ manufacturing yard
and many, many gatherings of freaks. It is literally, like nothing you’ve
ever seen, though you may occasionally have a vague sense of déjà vu. Why?
Well, even though his best work has been inaccessible, Jodorowsky’s
influence on film culture has been immeasurable. The trippy texts of
post-classical Hollywood – *Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider * – would never have
come to pass without *El Topo. * Famously, even the films Jodorowsky never
made have had a huge impact. The team he assembled for an aborted film
adaptation of *Dune * - Dan O'Bannon and the artists Jean Giraud (aka
Moebius), Chris Foss, and H.R. Giger – would recycle their ideas in *Alien.
* Meanwhile, many of Jodorowsky’s illustrations for production design would
find their way into *Star Wars; A New Hope.*

   “I think it is wonderful”, Jodorowsky tells me. “In a way, it makes it a
very rewarding experience. The team we put together for *Dune * did
everything we wanted to do. It is good that people admired what we did and
stole bits. It’s a tribute.”

  Marilyn Manson, who is scheduled to appear alongside Nick Nolte in
Jodorowsky’s next feature *King Shot*, was so taken with the imagery of *Holy
Mountain * that he asked the director to officiate at his non-denominational
marriage ceremony. On December 3rd, 2005, Jodorowsky, dressed in an
alchemist costume from the film, presided over the wedding of Marilyn Manson
and Dita Von Teese at Castle Gurteen in Kilsheelan, home of artist Gottfried
Helnwein , in Tipperary, Ireland.

  “He called me up and explained that he wanted to recreate the alchemist
sequence”, says Jodorowsky. “I said, ‘oh, but the film was made so many
years ago that I don’t have the right costume anymore’. He said, "Give me
your measurements and we'll find it." So when I came to Ireland to marry
him, the costume was waiting for me. That was his dream. I was just glad he
understood the picture.”

   - *The Jodorowsky Collection * is released on Tartan DVD on May 15th –

2009/4/13 Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>

> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0892411/
>
> http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/jodorowskys-king-shot-lensing-tis-summer/
>
> http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/absurda-lynch-herzog-jodorowski/
>
> http://twitchfilm.net/archives/006452.html
>
> http://twitchfilm.net/archives/006746.html
>
>
> http://www.quietearth.us/articles/2008/11/24/Interview-with-Alejandro-Jodorowsky-on-KING-SHOT-includes-concept-art
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20090413/5199be62/attachment-0001.html>