The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 24-30, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

My fellow Americans, I am here to humbly accept your nomination of Recapper of the Week in Screengrab! I think we all know it is time for a change. No longer can we sit by, complacent, while the screenwriter of Showgirls turns to Jesus. No longer can we allow Robert Downey Jr. to badmouth The Dark Knight. No longer can we stand by while good men like Phil Nugent and Andrew Osborne face-off over Judd Apatow and Pineapple Express!

No, my friends, this is a time for unity. A time for us to gather together and marvel at the World’s Greatest Animated Shorts – Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five! We must respect the Screengrab Fall Preview Picks of Andrew Osborne and Leonard Pierce, as different as they may be, as equal planks in our broad platform.

Some will tell you Guy Ritchie is caught up in the zeitgeist of slaggery. Some will insist that Fascination and Meet the Spartans are actually watchable movies. Some will wonder when Robert Zemeckis went bad, or why Terrence Howard would record an album, or under what circumstances David Lynch met Devo.

We don’t have all the answers! But we do know that That Guy is Bob Hoskins! We do know that Sukiyaki Western Django is some fucked-up shit! We do know that An American Carol is coming out whether we like it or not! And if we all stick together we can survive anything, even RocknRolla or a sequel to The Strangers !

God bless the Screengrab, and let’s make it a Wet Hot American Summer!

In Heaven: When David Lynch Met Devo

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:30:00 GMT

A new book with the long-ass title In Heaven Everything Is Fine: The Unsolved Life of Peter Ivers and the Lost History of New Wave Theatre by Josh Frank provides some insight into the early days of the Eraserhead cult. A musician and host of the underground cable show New Wave Theater, Ivers also wrote the song that supplies the first part of Frank’s book title. The Pixies have recorded it, Devo used to play it live, but it is best known as The Lady in the Radiator’s song from Eraserhead. (Ivers was murdered in 1983 – a case that remains unsolved.)

Eraserhead’s life as a midnight movie began in 1977 at the Nuart Theater in Santa Monica. In an excerpt from Frank’s book published in the LA Weekly, we learn that it was not an instant success. “The theater had picked up Eraserhead — the dark, surreal first film by a young David Lynch — for a Friday midnight slot. With the manic popularity of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the midnight-movie trend had blossomed into a full-fledged craze. In the year since it had reinvented itself as an art house, the Nuart Theatre had held down the Saturday midnight slot with Pink Flamingos, John Waters' cult raunchfest — including scenes of public urination, mother-son fellatio, consumption of dog feces, and the infamous ‘chicken fuck’ — whose success was measured by how many people threw up in the aisles of a given showing, and which, based on that measure, had been a consistent, raving success. Eraserhead,with its dark themes and obscure plot line, lacked the ready hooks of those films and was going to be a gamble for the theater.”

Nuart projectionist Steve Martin – not that one – was hooked immediately. “The movie haunted him. Its strange musical set piece was particularly evocative: A character known only as ‘The Lady in the Radiator’ — a platinum blonde in a shiny '50s-era dress, with strange, mufflery protrusions emanating from her cheeks — sings a song consisting mainly of five words repeated slowly and sweetly, to beautiful and incredibly unsettling effect.”

Martin was not the only one affected by Ivers’ song. “Devo arrived at Bob's Big Boy, and with everyone assembled, synapses began to fire. Peter and Lynch were clearly excited (and more than a little surprised) at the groundswell of interest Eraserhead had begun to generate in L.A. In Devo they recognized fellow travelers and were flattered by the band's request.” You can check out the rest of the story here, but meanwhile here’s The Lady in the Radiator:

Related:
David Lynch Enjoys Damn Fine Egg Salad Sandwich
David Lynch Calling

The Screengrab : devo

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: August 24-30, 2008

In Heaven: When David Lynch Met Devo