Revisiting CRASH

In the past couple of weeks, I have watched David Cronenberg's 1996 film of J.G. Ballard's CRASH no less than three times. This is a period when I should be reviewing new product, or perusing old product that was neglected the first time around, but CRASH started reaching out to me in ways that could not be denied.

It began innocently enough with me realizing that I had never acquired the film on DVD during those years of the industry's LD to DVD conversion, for two very good reasons: 1) the New Line DVD had not ported over the Cronenberg commentary and extras from the Criterion laserdisc, and 2) what it had put in their place was an optional R-rated viewing option, which I found offensive. I wrote about CRASH in a feature length essay that appeared in VIDEO WATCHDOG #42 (Nov/Dec 1997, sold out); since then, I hadn't seen the film again, but during that interval, I've sometimes asked myself if I might not have been too hard on it, because I'm such an admirer of J.G. Ballard's 1970 novel. (On one of my VIDEODROME interview tapes from 1982, I can be heard recommending to Cronenberg that he should read CRASH -- "I will," he promises).

I suddenly wanted to see the film again and my only ready option was my old Criterion laserdisc, which I decided to dub onto DVD-R in the process. The disc looked great on my old 32" Sony Trinitron, but viewed on my 60" Kuro Elite, the picture looks seriously dated: dim, pale in color with very uneven blacks, and, of course, non-anamorphic. I recorded the LD with its supplementary items (two cheesy trailers and a short featurette that finds the cast members talking about the project in mostly incoherent terms) and then recorded it again with Cronenberg's excellent, useful commentary activated.

Watching the film twice in close succession proved to be a useful exercise. In retrospect, CRASH appears to be the best film from Cronenberg's weakest period -- post-DEAD RINGERS to pre-SPIDER -- but, as brilliant as it sometimes is, it cannot meet the book's greatness even halfway. Yet there is something about it that tempts one to imagine that it will play even better on the next viewing -- and, in some ways, this hope holds true. After my second run-through, I knew that I couldn't live with my Criterion disc as my only reference copy anymore.

Thanks to the phenomenon of the Amazon Store, I was able to find a shrinkwrapped DVD for only $12. I watched it a few days after it arrived and it was indeed revelatory, not only as a sensual experience but because the enhanced anamorphic clarity of the image made sense of things the Criterion transfer had inadvertently glossed over, at least for me. For instance, the penultimate scene of Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter, a committed but miscast performance) and Gabriella (Rosanna Arquette)'s lesbian assignation in the back seat of a car never quite worked for me, seeming ungrounded in the rest of the story somehow; but the New Line DVD was so crisp and clear that I finally understood that they were coupling in the backseat of Vaughan (Elias Koteas)'s burned-out wreck of a car. The scene charts the inevitable next stage of Vaughan's advent into iconography.

I have not gone back to my original essay to refresh my memory of my raw first impressions of CRASH, but I remember writing that it's a failing of the film that James (James Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) are such inexplicably icy characters; they seem to be such compulsive sex-obsessives because they require the warmth of other people. I think I made the point that they seem like the tenants we see driving out of the Starliner highrise at the end of SHIVERS, parasite-driven erotophiles rather than real human beings. This is curious because Cronenberg's commentary admits to him not appreciating CRASH on his first reading, finding Ballard's language too clinical and without the "passion words" he needed to feel closer to the story. In Ballard, that clinical quality of the wording is its passion, but Cronenberg's translation of the text to the screen is not just cerebral but unfeeling. Seeing the film again did persuade me that Unger really is quite remarkable -- ravishing in an Ava Gardner, film noir kind of way, as Iain Sinclair notes in his fine BFI Modern Classics book on CRASH -- but misdirected, so that she's far too poised and abstracted. Spader's lead performance strikes a cold note, too, but at least he's permitted scenes that show him an aggressor in passion and not without a sense of humor. Unger, far better in David Fincher's wonderful THE GAME, doesn't quite thaw even when she momentarily fears that Vaughan might strangle her.

Elias Koteas as Vaughan, whose interpretation of the role I don't think I liked initially, turns out to be the film's ace in the hole. He's brilliant in the way he summons the charisma from this creep, who is somehow able to pass for a doctor in a hospital corridor, able to drive into roped-off accident sites on the highway with a flashbulb camera, able to slip his unwashed hand between Dr. Remington's legs in one brazen move and send James a primly conservative "what are you looking at?" reprimand look a second later. I also like how the film, moreso than the book, shows how the standards of people like James and Helen slip as they become lured into Vaughan's underground fetish world, ending up passing their evenings in the seedy living room of the stunt driver family, the Seagraves, watching videos of car crashes narrated in languages no one in the room understands.

There is an elliptic scene of male homosexual foreplay (involving bizarre medical tattoos of what Vaughan calls "ragged prophecies") and intercourse, but where the movie presses its most provocative buttons is in the car sex scene between James and Gabriella, who wears a bizarre kind of leather and metal body brace. James is shown removing the cumbersome accoutrement from her leg, ripping away her fishnet stockings to expose a frankly labial gash that runs up the back of her thigh, encompassing an even more frankly clitoral nub of flesh, and having sex with the wound. It's the film's most persuasively erotic scene, but the one leading into it -- Gabriella teasing a Mercedes dealer who tries to install her in a showroom car and ends up inflicting costly damage in the display model -- is anecdotal and silly, though extremely well played by Arquette. In his commentary, Cronenberg describes the car salesman as the most realistic character in the film, but he seems to me the least realistic -- a sitcom's idea of a car salesman.

The side break on the Criterion disc actually assists the film by punctuating a problem spot where the movie appears to have run out of money. One minute, James is in Vaughan's car and then we're suddenly looking at the back of James' head as he's looking out an office window -- it's still night, but he's somewhere else entirely. Someone, presumably a co-worker, asks if he needs a lift home. Without turning his head, James answers that Catherine is coming to pick him up. In the next shot, Catherine is there, outside James' office, watching, but so is Vaughan, clearly shaken up as he's questioned by police about some offscreen incident involving the hit-and-run of a pedestrian. "Vaughan's not interested in pedestrians," James says -- a nice line. The New Line DVD, which plays through without side break interruption, makes the viewer more aware of something missing, of something assembled from available pieces, in order to explain what would otherwise be the sudden introduction of Catherine into the backseat of Vaughan's car for the celebrated car wash sequence.

My retrospective interest in the film led me to belatedly acquire the aforementioned Iain Sinclair book, which I can enthusiastically recommend, especially to Ballard fans. He has problems with the film also, and the book spends most of its slim page count in a valuable exploration of J.G. Ballard's work and its adaptation to film, including some very rare early films either based on or somehow connected to Ballard's CRASH.

As for Cronenberg's CRASH, while I have a better feeling about it now than I did prior to this revisitation, it still leaves me very much in the same place where it leaves its two protagonists -- knocked sideways rather than for a loop, disappointed if not quite disengaged, and muttering to myself, "Maybe the next one... maybe the next one..."

Another CRASH

Bill Moseley in the unreleased film NIGHTMARE ANGEL, Zoe Bertoff's 1980s adaptation of J.G. Ballard's CRASH.

Brett Taylor, who contributes regularly to VW's "Biblio Watchdog" department, sent the above photo with the following letter after the posting of my J.G. Ballard post-mortem:

This fairly mundane still is all I was able to dig up on NIGHTMARE ANGEL, an adaptation of [J.G. Ballard's] CRASH from about 1984. I got it from the director, Zoe Beloff, who was just out of film school at the time. Bill Moseley says it's better than the Cronenberg version, but he would, wouldn't he? It was shot in industrial areas of New Jersey. I think there's some loophole about adaptations where you can do them so long as they're not shown for commercial purposes. I remember Stephen King saying he allowed anybody to film his stories as long as they pay a token fee of $1. So there've been many short films of his stories that have never been widely shown.

I've sat on this still for years. It was supposed to go with my Bill Moseley interview, but then PSYCHOTRONIC went under. I kept hoping they'd come back on the Internet, but after a few years I gave up on that notion. Then I had the vague notion of writing an article on unreleased films, but didn't think the world needed another "Day the Clown Cried" article. Now my interview is several years out of date, and I don't have any particular use for this shot. So I thought you might be interested in it.

I certainly am, and I thought other visitors to this blog would also be fascinated. Now how does one see NIGHTMARE ANGEL, a film I'd never heard of before, and which I don't recall being mentioned in Iain Sinclair's book on the book and film? Purely for non-commercial purposes, of course.

Thanks to Brett for sharing this interesting discovery.

Ballard Gone: World at Half Mast

Yesterday I would have described James Graham Ballard as our greatest living novelist; today, following his death from prostate cancer at the age of 78, I would still categorize him as arguably the most progressive thinker and commentator of our time. He found the beauty in places where beauty did not exist prior to his discovery: in desolation, in anomie, in medical language, in injury, in emotionless sex, in catastrophe, in sterility, in those places where hard corners open into infinite cold, where the imagination turns against itself. In some ways, I feel we continue to live in the 20th century precisely because most of us cannot follow Ballard's writing into the 21st century as it truly is. I consider CRASH the finest piece of writing I've ever read, and it (along with THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION) surely influenced the writing of my own novel THROAT SPROCKETS; CRASH taught me, more than all of Flaubert, more than all of Nabokov, the value of the mot juste, the perfectly crafted sentence and the value of transgression. Ballard himself observed that the book's cult success was not immediate, that it was initially accepted only by "a few psychopaths and amputees."

Somewhere in my archives I have a cassette of an early 1980s interview I conducted with David Cronenberg, during which I asked if he had ever read CRASH, which I expected he would like as it consolidated his obsessions with mutation and cars. He hadn't, but he promised he would. The film he eventually based on Ballard's book had its good points, but is not half so important or daring as the novel; likewise, Steven Spielberg's ambitious but overblown film of EMPIRE OF THE SUN. Jonathan Weiss's film of THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION comes much closer to the mark, making what was oblique and implicit in the original work more explicit while remaining true to its essential spirit and vocabulary.

One of Ballard's typically inspired book titles was A USER'S GUIDE TO THE MILLENNIUM. I feel this title would have been more accurately stamped on the cover of J.G. BALLARD QUOTES, a compendium of quotations from his interviews and fiction assembled by V. Vale and Mike Ryan for ReSearch Publications. I'd call it the perfect bedside book, if it didn't have the most extraordinary capacity to ignite the imagination and keep one up all hours, looking at all and sundry through Ballard's uniquely pitched spectacles. For example, he called Madonna's chromium-plated coffee table book SEX "a Commonplace book for our day, by the Daisy Ashford of the 1990s, as filled with homilies and naive dreams as the diary of any Victorian young lady." He included The Los Angeles Yellow Pages, as well as Burroughs' NAKED LUNCH, on his list of 10 Best Books. Yet he was more than a mere provocateur; these seeming provocations are actually laced with almost perilous insight and keen perspective. He had vision and the courage to use it, the capacity to look at the world around us with the poised disengagement of an art critic. Some called this perspective psychotic; I would call it Godly and the spectacle itself psychotic.

In RUSHING TO PARADISE, Ballard wrote "Contrary to general belief, no one's death diminishes us." Ballard's death enriches us by completing one of the most valuable shelves of literature in English.

Always Crashing Into Myriem Roussel

The talcum powder scene from Tristesse et Beauté.

My Myriem Roussel fever continues to run high. Thanks to eBay, I've been able to obtain ancient VHS PAL and SECAM pre-records of Joy Fleury's Tristesse et Beauté ("Sadness and Beauty," 1985) and Robert Van Ackeren's Die Venusfalle ("The Venus Trap," 1988), both featuring Roussel, neither of which was ever exported to America.

The former, which co-stars Charlotte Rampling and Andrzej Zulawski, casts Roussel as a sculptress. the younger woman in a lesbian relationship, who is sent by her partner to seduce and destroy a successful writer who broke her heart years before. The film was given a DVD release in Italy, which would certainly have yielded a much superior picture to the French SECAM crap I watched, but it would also have stuck me with Italian dubbed audio; at least on the tape, the original dialogue recording was intact. I found the movie compelling even without understanding all the dialogue; its images are gripping, its depictions of artistic process valid, and Roussel is absolutely lovely, acting with equal conviction in her love scenes with Rampling and Zulawski. It's an erotic film whose standout scenes spotlight personal hygiene, firstly as Roussel powders her body prior to an assignation with Zulawski, and secondly as Rampling uses a straight razor to shave her lover's underarms.


Die Venusfalle, from the director of A Woman in Flames, curiously downplays Roussel in its packaging, which toplines and pictures "Der Neue Erotik-Star" Sonja Kirchberger, though Roussel is given top-billing on the film itself. The movie is typical, pretentious, coked-up, '80s Eurotrash in many ways, with a soundtrack featuring various uncredited Bowie, Roxy Music and Iggy Pop tracks. Nevertheless, Roussel comes across as a real rock star here.

Her introduction, withheld until we're more than 20 minutes into the picture, must be one of the most outrageous ever dared. The unlikeable, arrogant, fashion-plate male protagonist, Max (Horst-Gunther Marx), struts into a pool hall, where he finds Marie (Roussel) playing billiards with a man. It's obvious they notice one another, but they're too cool to acknowledge the attraction, not even exchanging glances as she and her partner finish and leave. Cut to later that night, as both toss and turn in their respective beds with their respective lovers asleep beside them. They both awaken, silently dress, climb into their cars and roar off into the night. Moments later, their two cars independently arrive on opposite ends of the same street and accelerate toward one another in a game of Chicken, finally deflecting off one another in a scrape that sends both vehicles spinning out of control.










The two staggered drivers sit in their cars for a moment or two, eyeing each other like diagrammatically fated pawns. They recover their senses, exit their cars, start walking then running toward one another, collide in an embrace and proceed to make love right then and there, in the middle of the empty strasse.





Yes, the scene is ludicrous, even kitschy, yet it's more vividly staged and carries a stronger erotic charge than anything in Cronenberg's CRASH. And I ask you, does the cinema have a better reason to exist than to bring visions such as this within everyone's reach? (Well, everyone able to play PAL or SECAM tapes, anyway.)

There's another enjoyably preposterous scene where Max disrupts Marie's ballet recital; it's preposterous because Roussel, despite having a perfect swan-like neck and balletic grace, is much too tall to be part of a ballet chorus and looks awkward when raised. This doesn't alter the fact that she's an extraordinary creature and makes the film endurable, even irresistable, with her uncanny presence alone.

Throughout this alternately fascinating and annoying movie, I kept thinking that Georges Franju would have given his left arm to work with Roussel: she's Édith Scob and Francine Bergé rolled into one. Indeed, the final shot, in which she slips out a window wearing a fetching black danceskin, could easily pass for something Franju directed. Alas, though the very young Roussel was the protégé of Jean-Luc Godard, the Roussel of her late 20s and 30s appears never to have found the ideal interpreter of her particular brand of magic.

I understand that Die Venusfalle played in years past with English subtitles on the Australian superstation SBS. If anyone in my audience has a recording of that broadcast, or a copy of the Fleury film in English, please let me know how I might obtain a copy from you.

Review: BEAT GIRL (1960)

Gillian Hills means business, buster.

The following review was originally written for the unpublished VIDEO WATCHDOG #185.

BEAT GIRL
aka WILD FOR KICKS
1959, BFI Flipside, £19.99, PAL BD-B + DVD-1

BEAT GIRL (1960; US title: WILD FOR KICKS) is probably the quintessential British teensploitation picture - but also a good deal more. Directed by a middle-aged man who reportedly didn't understand the material or his young cast, the film clearly took its spin from James Dean and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, but it moves beyond that film's ken to become something moderately ahead of its time: a very early example of the baleful, insolent, aggressively confrontational films of generational divide that would surface near the end of the decade in films like RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP (1966), PSYCH-OUT (1967) and WILD IN THE STREETS (1968). It's a bit overdone in places, now and then even laughable, but its camp value is proud cover for an historically revealing depiction of post-war British youth - a product of traumatic times, reviling anything and everything proposed by their parents, absolutely hedonistic yet fearful of real human contact because, the way things are going, no one can really be trusted and it could all be over tomorrow. And make no mistake, one of the reasons the film plays so well today is because we can recognize ourselves in it.

BEAT GIRL has been released by BFI Flipside in the UK in a remarkably thorough set that includes no less than three versions of the film, identified as Theatrical, Alternative and Extended , as well as some rather significant extras. The Theatrical version represents the original UK release version, the Extended adds an introductory scene of the film's two mature newlyweds, Paul (David Farrar of BLACK NARCISSUS) and Nichole (Noelle Adam), and the Alternative adds this scene as well as spicier versions of certain scenes intended for continental release.

Despite the film's title and coffee bar milieu, BEAT GIRL is not really about beatniks, nor even mods and rockers; its young characters are becoming something that (as Jefferson Airplane once sang) hasn't got a name yet. Whatever they may be, it is unmistakably rooted in British post-war experience and the knowledge that anything that has happened before can happen again. Take, for example, this exchange, between Paul (a culturally clueless architect who is ironically designing a city of the future for Third World Countries) and his daughter, the film's pouty heroine Jennifer Linden (Gillian Hills, fresh from Roger Vadim's Les Liaisons Dangereuses):

PAUL: Where do you get your kicks from? Sitting around in cafés, listening to gramophone records? Jiving in underground cellars and caves?
JENNIFER: You are a real square, aren't you?
P: This language! These words! What does it mean?
J: It means us! Something that's ours! We didn't get it from our parents. We can express ourselves and they don't know what we're talking about. It makes us different!
P: Why do you need to feel so different?
J: It's all we've got! Next week - voom! Up goes the world in smoke! And what's the score? Zero! So now, while it's now, we'll live it up! Do everything. Feel everything. Strictly for kicks!

Shirley Ann Field, Gillian Hills and Adam Faith huddle in the underground.

Jennifer and her friends are contemptuous of their elders and express themselves in impressionistic slang - showing its origins in comics ("Voom!"), radio ("Over and out!") and television ("Fade out!") - that feels vaguely science-fictional, post-war yet pre-apocalyptic - or is it more accurately post-apocalyptic with its young survivors embodying, John Wyndham-like, England's inheritance by a new mutant strain? To quote the fractured English of Dave (Adam Faith), a musician resting between songs at the Chiselhurst Caves:

DAVE: Some dump, this is. It's like the war, coming down in the underground. There she was, my old lady, snug as a bedbug in the dark on the floor. That's where she had me. She was bombed-out, so that's where we lived. Just scared rats, underground. That was the first home I ever had. When it was over, I played on the bomb sites, amongst the rats. I'm tellin' you, man, this is a home from home for me. We're like rats, we are - the Rat Race Rock!

Such questions are only amplified by the presence in the supporting cast of Oliver Reed (cast in the film as a favor to his uncle, director Carol Reed) and Shirley-Ann Field, whose respectively unnamed/nicknamed characters - Plaid Shirt and Dodo - avoid one another in their shared scenes much as siblings would normally do, which allows BEAT GIRL to play as an accidental yet perfectly plausible prequel to Joseph Losey's THESE ARE THE DAMNED (1961). Indeed, BEAT GIRL concludes as  THESE ARE THE DAMNED begins, with the introduction of Teddy Boys.
 
Much as the young characters are depicted as works-in-progress, mutations in flux, dangerously in-between, the music to which they are shown abandoning themselves is not yet rock 'n' roll. John Barry's breakthrough film score (performed by his band The John Barry Seven) is a kind of hellbound jazz with wicked rockabilly accents - not too far afield from the gnarling guitar landscapes of Howard Shore's music for David Cronenberg's CRASH.

From the outset, Dail Ambler's script trivializes the real causes for pain and displacement among its young, citing parental neglect rather than existential uncertainty. Both the Alternative and Extended cuts open with a scene not found in the Theatrical version, which introduces middle-aged Paul and his new bride Nichole (THE WONDERS OF ALADDIN's Noëlle Adam) - in a shared British Railways compartment, their post-marital flirting observed with conservative disdain by fellow travellers and ticket punchers - implying that youth lives wherever it is felt, and is always resented by someone. Without this scene, the Theatrical cut plays more bluntly, and Nichole - who, like Jennifer (raised by a French nanny), is young, blonde and speaks with a Gallic accent - is felt much more as a sudden affront to our protagonist. Jennifer's petulant resentment of her new stepmother leads her to snoop into her past and unveil an embarrassing history of exotic dancing and prostitution. In the course of these investigations, Jennifer ventures into dangerous territory, namely a strip club operated by the tall, spidery-fingered Kenny King (Christopher Lee), who takes a covetous interest in Little Miss Dynamite that is timed to explode in his own face.

Christopher Lee proposes some intimate travel to the Beat Girl.

The above description may make BEAT GIRL sound like grim viewing, but it's actually hot fun from the very first "What ya got?" close-up of our simmering, sullen-faced heroine, after which it explodes into a main titles dance sequence that's equal parts divine and ridiculous, like the best of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, with Oliver Reed embarrassing himself on a dancefloor. Like the notorious Russ Meyer film, part of the balance is over-the-top melodrama but the only sense of humor here is whatever the viewer brings to it. It is fundamentally a serious film, a product of concern over what was happening to British youth and what might become of all that Britain had fought for, yet at the same time an exaggerated commercial exploitation of these fears that its target audience could dance to, laugh at, and flip off.

Director Edmond T. Gréville - a former journalist and critic who had served as an assistant to both Abel Gance and René Clair - would continue to work with Christopher Lee over the next few years on a couple of surprising continental productions, a 1960 remake of THE HANDS OF ORLAC starring Mel Ferrar (himself hot off another Vadim picture, BLOOD AND ROSES) and Antonio Margheriti's THE VIRGIN OF NUREMBERG aka HORROR CASTLE (1963), which he had a hand in writing. What all of these ventures share in common is a sensationalist edge, expressed in this film by a series of surprisingly torrid striptease acts, evidently impressed upon it by producer George Willoughby (who subsequently went on to co-produce THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH and WAR-GODS OF THE DEEP for American International).

Gillian again, dancing to the end of the world with Oliver Reed.

BFI Flipside's two-disc BEAT GIRL set offers three distinct cuts of the film: the UK theatrical release (84m 11s PAL DVD/87m 46s BD), an alternate version with two bonus scenes and softer versions of certain scenes (complete on BD, represented on DVD with 3m of alternate scenes), and an extended version previously issued on DVD including the two bonus scenes and the full-strength versions of the softened sequences (88m 55s PAL DVD/92m 42s BD). The three versions of the film are presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1, in English with hard-of-hearing English subtitles, with a PCM mono track on BD and a Dolby Digital 2.0 mono track on the DVD9 disc. An accompanying booklet collects a brief reminiscence by Gillian Hills, essays by Vic Pratt (on the film, with quotes from co-star Adam Faith), Johnny Trunk (on Barry's score) and Jo Botting (on Gréville) and notes on the various extras, which offer rewarding context for the main feature.

Aside from the bonus cuts, the most exciting of the supplements is "An Interview with Gillian Hills" (24m 25s PAL DVD/25m 27s BD), in which the still-attractive star proves herself articulate and clear in her recollections of the production, its particulars, and her co-stars, most of whom she sketches with remarkable insight and sensitivity. One only wishes that she had remained available to hold court on the rest of her fascinating career, from her bit parts in BLOW-UP and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE to her fuller roles in THE OWL SERVICE mini-series, Hammer's DEMONS OF THE MIND and Georges Franju's La faute de l'abbé Mouret. Some of our readers might be still more impressed by the film short CROSS-ROADS (1955, 18m 31s PAL DVD/19m 18s BD), which relates to BEAT GIRL on two counts: it's about the salacious, exploitative side of show business and features a pre-Hammer top-billed performance by Christopher Lee. Written and directed by John Fitcher, the second half of the film is an extended meeting between Lee and fellow future vampire Ferdy Mayne, which suddenly takes a surprising supernatural twist and delivers the cinema's earliest close-up of Lee's piercing gaze. Also included are a pair of 3m titillation shorts, BEAUTY IN BRIEF (1955) and GOODNIGHT WITH SABRINA ("c.1958" though it looks a bit later to us), in which a couple of busty ladies from our mother or grandmother's generation change clothes and bubble-bathe.

One of the best Blu-ray releases of 2016, BEAT GIRL can be acquired at the other end of this link.

(c) 2016 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved by the author.

With The Lub: Michael Lennick (1952-2014)

One of my dearest friends, Michael Lennick - writer, director, producer, cameraman, editor, visual effects designer and mensch (a word he taught me) - has sadly left us away at the age of 61.

Donna and I first met him on the set of VIDEODROME (for which he was the video effects supervisor) in December 1981. Of all the people I met there, Mikey was the one I bonded with most closely and lastingly. When I returned to Toronto the following March, we celebrated the end of the shoot with an all-night summit in his living room, at which time he introduced me to the pleasures of home video, obviously a major eureka in my life. 

He also presided over others. It was Michael who introduced me to sushi, which has been my favorite thing to eat since that fateful day in 1983. In the first year of the new century, he produced my first two DVD audio commentaries - and he was astounded when I told him that I'd now done more than thirty. He was also a favorite VIDEO WATCHDOG contributor, whose ten pieces for us include feature articles on STAR WARS, STARSHIP TROOPERS and his hero Stanley Kubrick, as well as a recent review of John C. Fredericksen's 1950s series MEN INTO SPACE that presently awaits publication. He gave me a place to crash whenever I was in town, and took me to shop at Sam the Record Man's and Memory Lane Books, both of which are now history. We read and critiqued each others' unpublished and unproduced work. I introduced Michael, a milk drinker, to the pleasures of Chivas Regal scotch and cigars, and we braved one early morning set call on THE DEAD ZONE after only three hours' sleep; it was the day they filmed Christopher Walken in the burning room - it's a miracle that we, in our dark glasses, didn't spontaneously combust. He would show me scenes of films we both loved - including Mario Bava films - and help me to deconstruct the special effects shots, some of the most important lessons in filmmaking I ever had. During my last visit north of the border, we shared the experience of synching up the Stargate sequence of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY to Pink Floyd's "Echoes." It worked remarkably well. Michael also filmed a wonderful testimonial for our Indiegogo campaign for VIDEO WATCHDOG's Digital Archive; he was delighted by the demonstration he saw and was looking forward to seeing the technology applied to his own articles.

Michael as I first knew him, with his VIDEODROME team, Lee Wilson and Rob Meckler.

As you can imagine, I loved Mikey as much as I've ever loved any man. He called me Timmy, and I let him. He signed most of his letters to me with the warm salutation "with the lub," so I know it was mutual. Thus the news came hard when we found out, a few weeks ago, that he had suffered a collapse and been hospitalized, where he was being kept comatose as tests were being made. Over the weekend, the news finally came that he had succumbed to a virulent form of brain cancer last Friday, November 7th. Michael, my brother from another mother, whom I met on the set of a now-classic movie about a video signal that causes brain tumors.

I know what he accomplished, and though he would argue it was not enough, his career was a triumph that he largely managed on his own terms. He produced work that was loved: his early cult hit THE ALL-NIGHT SHOW; his special effects work for the teleseries WAR OF THE WORLDS (where he got to recreate the Martian war cruisers of George Pal's classic film); the documentary DR. TELLER'S VERY LARGE BOMB, which featured the last interview granted by Edward Teller; the acclaimed documentary series ROCKET SCIENCE and THE SCIENCE IN FICTION, with their access to pretty much anybody who was anybody in the space program; the top-shelf film documentaries THE NEW MAGICIANS and 2001 AND BEYOND; and so many other projects that enabled Michael to meet and befriend his heroes in the space program and the annals of classic science fiction. Children of the 1980s also loved him as the voice of Boneapart, the skeletal sage of OWL TV.

Michael's classic character performance: OWL TV's Boneapart.

Michael spent much of this past year reconnecting with and interviewing people he had known from the Cronenberg days (including the recently departed Gary Zeller) for "The SCANNERS Way,"  the documentary he contributed to Criterion's recent SCANNERS Blu-Ray release, and conducting preparatory interviews and research for a projected documentary called THE CHILDREN OF PEARL HARBOR, which brought him back into the orbit of his old friend, artist Shary Flenniken - so his last year was ultimately one of closure. In our last telephone conversation, a couple of months ago, he told me that things were looking good for a projected series based on the short stories of Harlan Ellison, another of his idols who became a good personal friend.

My heart goes out to Michael's siblings David and Julie and to everyone who loved him - especially his beloved partner Shirley, the love of his life. I was staying with him when they had their first date and I remember how excited he was as he was getting dressed to go out. Our last communications were on Facebook and about grief, concerning the untimely passings of Michael's friends and colleagues Reiner Schwarz and Linda Griffiths. Linda also died at 61 years of age. Too young, we agreed.