When Charles Napier Talks, People Twitter

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

We don't want to oversell it or anything, but Nathan Rabin's interview with Charles Napier for The Onion's A.V. Club is the greatest thing ever and deserves to be republished in the slimmest-ever edition of the Library of America series. For the benefit of those so benighted they have a moment's difficulty placing a name to the face or vice versa, the 73-year-old Kentucky-born Napier broke into the business as a space hippie on a 1969 episode of Star Trek before becoming a part of Russ Meyer's stock company. He subsequently became part of Jonathan Demme's stock company, playing the bigamous trucker Chrome Angel in Citizens Band and sticking on a chef's hat for Something Wild and a judge's robe for Philadelphia. (It was his performance in Citizens Band that inspired Pauline Kael to describe him as looking like "a Brian Keith made of concrete." He's done the rounds of TV series guest spots and a lot of voice work, channeling Ted Turner for his regular stint on the Jon Lovitz cartoon The Critic, and he can now be seen in the straight-to-video One-Eyed Monster, in which he does battle with Ron Jeremy's killer penis. (No, for real.) So it's not as if he doesn't have a career to talk about. It must have seemed, going in, that the trick would be to get him to open up. Turns out he was wide open with the screen door banging.

On "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: "I was associate producer on that. They brought me, [Roger] Ebert, and Russ Meyer over to 20th Century Fox because Daryl Zanuck saw this movie we were making, and they wanted a part of it. So we did the movie, they released it. It made lots of money, and it kind of went away for 15 years, ’cause the country club where the producers all went didn’t want to be associated with an X-rated movie. Anyway, they finally re-released it again. It was a very successful hit. It was Russ’ big time at a major studio. He was very pleased with it. Of course, it was my fun too until the day they walked in and took our names off the door and said “Get off the lot.” Everything you did with Russ Meyer was a nightmare, everything was a total fucking catastrophe. It had to be done the Army way, it had to be done his way...This is how we made those first movies: we camped, we stayed outside, we cooked outside. No permits, nothing. We took two cameras, he handheld both of them, edited all of them, and I did all the stunts, I did all the car driving, I did all the makeup and that shit. It occurred to me later that we shot in the desert so the women couldn’t run away from the shoot."

On breaking into the Universal TV series factory: "So now I’m 40 years old and I’m back living on the streets of Hollywood in a parking lot under Russ Meyer, who owned the parking lot. And I said 'It’s over, man. I have no agent, I have no phone, I have no address, I have no nothing.' I had a little unemployment to go. And one day some guy came down the street with a megaphone asking my name, and I’m sitting there with the rest of the winos. I go 'Yeah, what’s up, that’s me.' I hadn’t had a haircut in two months, or a shave, or whatever. He says, 'They want to see you at Universal.' I go, 'What for?' He goes, 'You’ll find out when you get there, you want to go or not?' I go, 'I’m assuming if I don’t go, your ass is gonna be in a lot of trouble, is that correct?' He goes, 'That’s correct.' And we go straight to the lot in the back of the limo, straight to the office of Alfred Hitchcock. They said, 'Don’t say a damn word to him, don’t even look at him. He’s gonna be 10 feet away, and he’s gonna spin around a chair in a dramatic way. He’s gonna say "Go away," or he’s gonna say "Sign him."' So Hitchcock is looking at the guy standing beside him, and he says 'Tell him to turn around.' So I turned around, and Hitchcock said, 'Sign him.' And that was the end of it. I worked from then on, because I worked for Alfred Hitchcock. He owned a big percentage of Universal."

On working with Meyer: "I don’t really have a favorite of any of the pictures I did for him. There’s some stuff in there that scares the shit out of me, frankly, like the frontal nudity in Cherry, Harry & Raquel where I thought, 'Maybe I shouldn’t do this shit.' All it does is show me and whatever her name is galloping toward the camera, me in a cowboy hat and boots and nude. Years later he asked me—we were in a theater, actually, at the Paramount—and he said,'“Charlie, are you ever sorry you did that?' And I go, 'No, but my mother is.'"

On playing a space hippie: "... the writer was 65 years old. What did he know about hippies, right? And Shatner and all of them were upset about it, and of course I didn’t know any difference. I still get letters about that today. In fact, I just got one yesterday. Thirty years later, they wanted me to come back and do a Deep Space 9 and I just—not to be an a-hole about it—I just said, 'Look, I don’t want to wear that silly shirt again. If you can write a role where I’m a general of an army base…'”

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO (1975)

I can't say for certain whether or not I first encountered the work of Sally Cruikshank in general (or Quasi at the Quackadero in particular) on the USA Network's 1980s stoner staple Night Flight, but either way, I'm pretty sure I wasn't entirely in a legal frame of mind at the time. Not that psychedelic substances are required to appreciate Quasi's dreamy, stream-of-consciousness groove: Cruikshank's anarchic style is a mind-altering substance all by itself, a subterranean version of the (relatively) clean, orderly mainstream Disney/Looney Tune style of animation with all the color, personality, wisecracking animals and fairy tale fancy reflected in a funhouse mirror of surrealistic Id.

NEIGHBOURS (1952)

You wouldn’t get very far in a discussion of great animated shorts without mentioning the National Film Board of Canada. Since 1941, the NFB has supported and funded important and groundbreaking works from some of Canada’s most important animators, beginning with the great Norman McLaren. McLaren experimented with a number of animation techniques throughout his career including pixellation and even scratching and painting on the film stock itself. But today, his most famous work is Neighbours, a hybrid of stop motion animation and live action photography. The film -- an allegory for the Cold War -- finds McLaren using his human subjects not as actors, but as mannequins to be literally manipulated in the service of his story (somewhere, Robert Bresson must have swooned). Stylistically playful yet thematically serious, Neighbours became one of the most feted animated shorts of its day, yet it’s a testament to its topicality that it ended up taking home not the Best Animated Short Oscar, but rather the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

MIRACLE OF FLIGHT (1974)

Terry Gilliam made this five minute film after the original Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series had completed its final season but before Python caught on in the United States, a development that, along with the success of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, made it clear that the troupe would remain a going concern for years to come. Gilliam would later develop his own voice as a live-action filmmaker, but this cartoon is basically a stray Python skit that's developed at greater length than most of the animated bits that Gilliam contributed to the TV shows. Not that there's a goddamn thing wrong with that.

CREATURE COMFORTS (1989)

Nick Park, the co-founder of Aardman Animation (and the creator of Wallace and Gromit) had a weirdly accomplished triumph with this award-winning short, which attaches the thoughts expressed by man-on-the-street interview subjects to animals doing time in a zoo. The success of the film led to a series of TV commercials in a similar style and then, in 2003, to a brilliant TV series that ran for two seasons in Britain. (CBS commissioned an American version for a summer series last year but pulled the plug after broadcasting three of seven completed episodes.)

THE CRITIC (1963)

Pauline Kael once wrote that "the best way" that Mel Brooks "could be employed on any movie" would be for him to "hang around on a cloud" during shooting, "with permission to replace any actor at any point." Nice image, Pauline, but Ernest Pintoff trumped you when he made this parody of an arty animated short, and then put the icing on the gravy by asking Brooks to assume the persona of an old Jewish man -- this was back when Brooks was still a young Jewish man -- and record this worthy's baffled responses to what the hell his eyeballs were being subjected to as punishment for having dared to venture into a movie theater with an expectation of being entertained. It's too bad that Brooks doesn't still have a way of getting in touch with that cranky old guy; we'd love to sit next to him at Young Frankenstein on Broadway.

FRANK FILM (1973)

Frank Mouris wrote, directed, edited, and narrates this autobiographical collage, which aims to sum up the artist's life as best he can through nine minutes of words and images. Mouris talks about his experiences and impressions on the soundtrack while pictures of things important or just pleasing to him crowd onto the frame. The total effect is of an amazingly cool, elegant fever dream.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

The Screengrab : the critic

When Charles Napier Talks, People Twitter

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Three)