Gunnar Hansen's "Chain Saw Confidential." A cheap solution for barotrauma makes biologists and rockfish happier. Weighing fracking in Sacramento. Slapstick 101.
Gunnar Hansen pulls the mask off Leatherface in 'Chain Saw Confidential'
For actor Gunnar Hansen, who played the iconic Leatherface monster, filming "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" wasn't any fun. Sure, the movie went on to become a horror classic, but back in the '70s when Hansen was filming with director Tobe Hooper in the stifling Texas summer, it was a lot of grueling, sometimes 26-hour days.
Early on in filming, Hooper created tension between his actors. "He told the other actors that I was a loner and not very friendly and did not like people, so to leave me alone," Hansen says. "It made me feel like Frankenstein after a while because nobody would talk to me."
But Hooper, along with his co-writer Kim Henkel and editor Larry Carroll, were willing to go a little too far to get the movie they wanted.
"This was a different animal.There wasn't anything like it. The closest thing was 'Night of the Living Dead,' but it was not like what the other horror films were at the time; they'd done nothing like it. We knew this was really, really different. That was one of the reasons I think people hated 'Texas Chain Saw Massacre,' because they felt like we had really done something." --Film Editor Larry Carroll from "Chain Saw Confidential"
Sometimes, the set of "Chain Saw" was downright dangerous. "Tobe [Hooper] wanted the saw live and fully functional because he wanted to hear it bind down," Hansen says. "We were just too ignorant to know any better."
But exhausting, dangerous filming conditions aside, there's no denying the influence "Chain Saw" would have on the horror genre and culture in general.
"...'Chain Saw' changed something fundamental in horror — good no longer always overcomes evil. The monster was not destroyed. As an audience we were not safe in that respect, either. The movie was nihilistic, and it allowed many others after it to be." -- Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen from "Chain Saw Confidential"
Gunnar Hansen will make a number of appearances while he's here in LA (including one Friday):
- Thursday, Sept. 19, 7pm at Book Soup in Hollywood. More info here.
- Friday, Sept. 20, 7:30pm at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. More info here.
- Saturday, Sept. 21, 2pm at Dark Delicacies in Burbank. More info here.
VIDEO: What fish barotrauma is, why it's bad, and how to stop it.
Have you heard of barotrauma? It's a condition experienced by some deep water fish who rise to the surface. Marine biologist and Off-Ramp commentator Milton Love explains:
"Baro means pressure. And they have a swim bladder — a gas bladder inside their bodies in their gut cavity. The gas is under pressure. If you bring them up from 100 feet, or 200 feet, the gas expands. And it's like having a balloon inside your body."
The result isn't pretty. Especially if you're a rockfish. There are over 50 species of rockfish off the California coast--many are sold here and advertised as red snapper. Although the condition itself isn't fatal, it often means a death sentence for rockfish caught and released by sport fishermen in California. The fish has no way to get back down to depth, so they float at the surface. Inevitably, a sea bird will find and eat the unlucky rockfish.
But now the rockfish can breathe easier: Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with Love about a cheap, simply solution for barotrauma, which affects rockfish — like snapper — caught by sport anglers. There's even a video to go with it to explain the process:
Milton Love a marine biology professor at UC Santa Barbara--and also author of two books on the subject.
SLAPCON teaches how to get silly safely
At the former Nestlé’s Chocolate Factory in LA’s Historic Filipino District last week, a communal gathering of comedy performers was getting physical.
A theatrical underground of funny people inside this 6,000 square foot space on Temple Street (the building also houses the LA Derby Dolls), SLAPCON 2013 featured clowns, acrobats, jugglers of all shapes and sizes crashing into each other, collapsing on mats, and poking punchy all over the place.
It looked like a convention of Keystone Kops, Laurel & Hardy, Keaton & Lloyd, and many, many Stooges. More than two-dozen physical comedians, for two days, twelve hours a day knocking about and no air-conditioning. This is a festival?
Pancake juggling chef and organizer of SLAPCON Scot Nery said he just, “sent out information to a bunch of clowns and stuntmen and here we are; physical performers, comedians, actors, all kinds of who want to exert themselves and figure out what the limits of their physical abilities are.”
Performers from LA, San Francisco and New York took part, including Hilary Chaplain, who tours the world with her clown and solo shows. She described SLAPCON as a “big cross-pollination of people from within the normal circles of physical comedy mixed with people new to it, creating a larger circle of folks who want to expand within this form.”
The form of slapstick goes back at least as far as the Renaissance—well, I’m sure probably to the “Clan of the Cave Bear”—but when travelling theater troupes performed their outdoor commedia dell’arte they had a club made of two wooden slats (a battocchio) and used it to hit each other. Fast-forward from the 15th century and you find yourself in the middle of a breakaway beer bottle fight, right?
, a blogger at the LA Times, was a clown working on her technique at SLAPCON . “You’re falling and you’re learning to take it and love it,” she said. “You’re really just embracing all the hits.” Kaplan, developing a solo show called, “The Ballad of Daggers Mackenzie,” told me one of the great pleasures of SLAPCON was having plenty of playtime.
“For me, this is one big heaping helping of improv,” she said. “And release and energetic wonder. I get to slap people and fall, and love it. Because we don’t get to hit people enough in fair society.”
Kurt Vonnegut defined slapstick (in his book "Slapstick") as: “grotesque situational poetry.” Hi ho. And there’s plenty of that at SLAPCON; everything from Cirque and Alexander technique was on display, with an emphasis on team work and safety, counterbalance and general goofiness involving skits, props, pulling faces and shoving shaving cream.
Each activity, said Scot Nery, is geared toward “learning and advancing the art of violent physical comedy.”
Movie and TV stunt people were attracted to SLAPCON , too. Jeri Kalvan, who did all of Kirsten Dunst’s stunts in the Spider Man movies, and works with the likes of Bryce Howard and Alyson Hannigan, digs the “amazing creative energy” she found.
“Everybody’s in,” she says, while helping Nery cook up sumptuous meals attendees scarfed up just outside the warehouse/hothouse of hijinks. “I would recommend this to other stunt actors. You’re learning to fall. And it’s more about live performance.”
Suzanne Haring, from Redondo Beach, is a stilt walking balloon-creating clown (she builds and boards entire galleons out of balloons for Pirates of the Caribbean premieres) and has been performing for nearly 40 years. She told me the older you get, the more you really do not want to hurt yourself doing physical comedy. “Especially with slapstick,” she said, “where you’re not supposed to get hurt doing it even though it looks like you’re getting slapped and kicked and punched. But you do throw your head back and you do throw your body around, so learning how to do it in a way that doesn’t hurt me…”
She said one of her great loves is “crashing on the floor with a big fluffy mat.”
“Come on you gotta try it!” she hollered.
Well, since there’s a fine line between slapstick and slapshtick … no thanks.
Meanwhile, Philip Solomon, proprietor at the 1901 Temple Street venue (“Way 2 Much Entertainment, Innovative Theatrical Specialists”) said his plan is to keep this indoor playground open for any performer in need of a workout. And he’ll also be reaching out to Echo Park residents and his “Hi-Phi” neighbors, offering classes in the kind of physical fooling his friends at SLAPCON love to dive – and fall—right into.
Vonnegut said something else in "Slapstick" I like: “The fundamental joke with Laurel & Hardy it seems to me, was they did their best with every test. They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account.”
A fine inspiration for slapstick partakers everywhere.
Haefele: Sign the fracking bill, Governor. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
UPDATE: Governor Brown signed SB4 on Friday.
AP: Brown said in his signing message that SB4 "establishes strong environmental protections and transparency requirements," but that he will seek some additional changes next year to clarify the new requirements. His spokesman, Evan Westrup, declined to elaborate on what those amendments will attempt to address. The governor added in his message that he will direct the state Department of Conservation to group drilling permits based on factors such as geologic conditions and environmental impacts when possible as a way to boost efficiency. He also said the department's permit-review system should allow for "more particularized review" of permit applications when necessary.
After months of foot dragging in the Legislature, the state’s first law regulating the controversial gas and oil drilling process called fracking is awaiting Governor Brown's signature.
Back in May, media and corporate managers were treated to a fantastic 5-course lunch to help persuade us of the feasibility of natural gas as a motor fuel, now that it costs half as much as gasoline. No one mentioned that the reason the fuel had got so cheap was because of a process called fracking, but then no one had to. This was a production of the American Natural Gas Alliance, to whom the fracking industry is part of “America’s shale revolution … a game-changer for the entire American economy.”
They mean change for the better. A recent 70-page report sponsored by the alliance declared that fracked gas has already made the average US household $1,200 dollars richer, and that number will keep going up. The cheap gas isn’t just making electricity cheaper, according to the report. It’s making plastics, manufactured goods and even artificial fertilizers—and hence food -- cheaper. The report predicts a golden century of plentiful energy.
But there are those who consider the game change a loser. “Snake Oil,” a book by Richard Heinberg, of the Santa Rosa-based Post Carbon Institute, throws cold water on the frack gas promise. Heinberg accuses frack fomenters such as the alliance of “taking the highest imaginable resource estimate’’ and “the highest possible recovery rates” then adding them up to produce the fantasy of a 100-year cheap energy boom … when the reality might bust at 10 or 20 years.
Of course nearly every conservation group sees fracking as a threat—to the water supply, to livestock health, to farming, to the American landscape itself. From Texas to Pennsylvania to Ohio, stories of flaming faucets and poisoned wells have filled the media, leading to attempts to regulate fracking that have, in most states, fizzled due to the political clout of the energy industry and the fact that fracking does produce jobs and generally pays well for leases.
But California's lawmakers have produced such a law. It’s surprising that it’s run into late opposition from groups who’ve battled for such regulation elsewhere. In opposing Democratic Senator Fran Pavley’s SB 4, the LA Times editorialized that it wasn’t tough enough. (The editorial drew a lengthy "clarification" from Sen. Pavley.)
But environmentalists have moved beyond that objection -- now they want to stop fracking altogether. They know that even natural gas contributes to global warming, while wind and solar power do not. And of course crude oil is much worse. The new consensus wants to junk SB 4 and seek a total ban next year.
SB 4 is now sitting on the governor's desk. He has until Oct. 13 to sign it. I think he should.
The major California fracking focus is the Monterey Shale region – 16,000 square miles of central California that could hold a different energy revolution-- 15 billion barrels of oil, plus unknown amounts of gas. The problem is getting it. Experts on both sides agree that Monterey shale layers have been so twisted over millions of years by California’s savage techtonics that extant fracking techniques may not work.
But what if they do work?
What if Monterey offers our state the biggest frack in the nation? Vast riches for our still faltering economy? Thousands of new—if mostly short term-- jobs all over some of California’s poorest regions? Then it will be far harder to pass any fracking regulation in Sacramento, let alone a complete ban. No, this is the law we can have now and that makes it a good law. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
As Pavley puts it, “The world won’t be perfect if SB 4 passes, but it will be a whole lot better.”
Marc Haefele is a regular Off-Ramp commentator. Please respond to his opinions in the comments section below.
Autry veteran now rides herd on Smithsonian's American History museum
Los Angeles continues to provide the nation’s capital with top talent at arts institutions - Arvind Manocha left the LA Phil for Wolftrap; Richard Koshalek left the Art Center College of Design for the Hirshhorn. And a veteran of the Autry National Center now oversees one of the gems on the National Mall.
John Gray wanders the new food exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, conducting his own field poll. He asks visitors from Switzerland and South Korea standing near the perfectly reconstructed kitchen of Julia Child if they know who she is. "A cook? Yes?" they respond, recalling the 2009 film "Julie and Julia." Gray, who’s been the museum’s new director for about a year now, is delighted. He calls the exhibit “classic Smithsonian” -- helping foreign visitors to understand America. Gray says if there was ever an expression of our culture and how to understand us, "it’s through food. And Julia personifies that because she made French cooking American!"
Gray thought he was going to retire in 2009, after more than a decade leading the Autry National Center of the American West in Griffith Park. He moved to a farm in New Mexico, enrolled in grad school, and then got a call out of the blue from a headhunter. He barely hesitated. "Could there be a better job than the director of the National Museum of American History?"
Gray says the Autry taught him how to make American history accessible, relevant, and interesting to the widest possible audience. Like the Autry, he says the Smithsonian tells "the most inclusive story - complicated, dramatic, contested – we tell all those stories here, which is really one national story."
The big difference between the two museums is scale. The Autry curates 750 thousand objects; the Smithsonian cares for more than 3 million items -- everything from Dorothy’s ruby red slippers to full scale trains. The Autry hosts about a hundred fifty thousand visitors a year; five million people crowd the American History Museum. Giving large crowds a good experience is a challenge.
Gray notes that the Smithsonian offers living history programs for visitors. Over near the actual Greensboro lunch counter that was the focus of a key anti-segregation chapter in the 1960s, a young woman dressed in period attire coaches a crowd in the fine points of non-violent protest and teaches them a civil rights anthem.
Space has been a challenge for both institutions. The Smithsonian is in the middle of a 37-million dollar renovation of the west wing. Fundraising is underway to remodel the other half of the museum. Gray’s no stranger to construction projects. His plans for a 175-million dollar expansion at the Autry was dropped four years ago after LA City officials insisted the Griffith Park institution keep the historic but dilapidated Southwest Museum building functioning as a museum. Gray says the cost of getting that building in shape would be 40-million dollars. Supporters of the Southwest and the Autry have been fighting ever since.
Gray gives a nod to the political fights taking place here in Washington at the other end of the National Mall, saying folks in Congress could learn something from their own history as they tackle the issues of the day. He says the discussion over scale of government has been going on "since the nation was founded." Issues like taxation - the reason the nation was founded - isn't new. Gray says "understanding our history will give us much greater comfort and direction about the future."
John Gray says he’s brushed up on history himself since moving to Washington, taking road trips to east coast battlefields and historic sites, saying we also learn our history through place.
H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon invades San Pedro Sept. 27-29
The weirder, goofier literary successor to Poe, Howard Phillips Lovecraft's short horror stories have inspired everyone from Stephen King to director Guillermo del Toro. Lovecraft has been dead for more than 70 years now, but his following is larger than ever.
Sept. 27-29, San Pedro hosts the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival where they'll screen movies inspired by the author's works.
"There's just something really visceral where he [Lovecraft] strikes a chord with a lot of people," says festival organizer Aaron Vanek. With his own mythology (often called the Cthulhu Mythos), settings taken from real life and recurring themes, Lovecraft created his own world -- a world that fans still live in today. "There's this appeal for those that are interested in horror that's creepy, that's gothic, that's weird... that's far more than a lot of slasher, gory stuff."
This year, backed by a successful Kickstarter campaign, the film festival will take place at San Pedro's art-deco Warner Grand Theatre. But Lovecraft fans are set to invade much more than the theatre. The festival (and CthulhuCon) will include pub trivia at The Whale & Ale, an audio drama by Macabre Fantasy Radio Theater and vendors like Arkham Bazaar and Mythos Foundry.
Feature films at the festival include "In the Mouth of Madness" and "The Unnamable" --plus "Dagon," presented by director Stuart Gordon, who will be in attendance.
The festival will feature short films, too, like "The Banshee Bride" from director Jason Voss and "Reset," from Swedish directors Fredrik Åkerström and Marcus Kryler.
Tickets range in price from $20 to $125 for a VIP pass, or, if you can't make it to San Pedro, you can buy a "There in Spirit" pass, which gets you access to a LiveStream of the festival and the film shorts. More info on tickets here.
Dylan Brody uses logic to defeat the Devil's advocate and talk radio fan
Off Ramp commentator Dylan Brody is a humorist, storyteller and pompous know-it-all.
My manager holds an annual holiday party as his house. This year, my wife and I found ourselves engaged in a lovely conversation with a small group that was suddenly hijacked by a pompous know-it-all. This irritated me. Pompous know-it-all is the position I like to occupy in a conversation, and he was usurping it.
Also he was doing it more loudly, and less entertainingly, than I do, a sin only marginally less heinous in my eyes than doing it subtly and more entertainingly. He was one of these cretins who blithely states as fact gibberish he has absorbed from a talk-radio host.
“We could solve the whole budget problem if we just didn’t have so many free-loading teachers and single mothers!” Or, “Taxpayers shouldn’t have to cover state workers’ salaries and pensions. I mean, that’s called double dipping! Duh!”
He would follow each of these proclamations with “I’m just sayin’,” which is code for, “I don’t actually want to discuss this. I want to lecture. If you don’t agree, please keep it to yourself as I have nothing invested in my opinion beyond my desire to state it.”
Just as I was running out of patience, the man said, “You know, if we didn’t have unions, maybe corporations wouldn’t have to outsource to foreign countries for cheap labor. I’m just sayin’.”
I said, “Do you even hear what you’re 'just sayin’'?”
He put up his hands as if he was surrendering, but said in a confrontational tone, “Hey. Don’t yell at me. I’m just being the Devil’s advocate.”
I said, “The Devil doesn’t need an advocate. He’s the devil.”
Baffled, the man said, “What?”
I said, “Once you concede that you are representing the position of the Devil, you give up the right to claim the moral high ground.”
“OK,” he said. “All right. I get it. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion.” And then, thinking himself very witty, he said, “No matter how wrong it might be.”
He looked to the other people in the group for support and agreement. His raised eyebrows gave the expressionist equivalent of the comedian’s, “Am I right, ladies?”
My wife, ever the peacemaker, said, “Sometimes, it’s not all about what you say, but rather how you say it.”
The man dipped into his big sack of stupid and pulled out the hackneyed line, “What’s that in the road? A head?” Nobody laughed, which pleased me.
I said, “Wait. I have a great example of this! A long time ago I had a gig doing stand-up on a cruise ship. One afternoon the cruise director had a really bad stomach thing, so I was asked to stand at the top of the gangplank, and as the tourists returned from their port o’ call, I was to say, 'Welcome aboard, watch your step,' so they wouldn’t trip as they made the slight transition up from the plank to the deck. I was young and pompous and didn’t like it that, as a performer, I was being asked to pick up this task that rightly belonged to someone in the lowly world of customer service. But I discovered very quickly that I could both do the job as asked and entertain myself immensely if, instead of saying, 'Welcome aboard. Watch your step,' and gesturing to the little booby trap of uneven footing, I made eye contact and said, 'Welcome aboard. Watch your step.' They focused nervously on me, tripped over the lip and stumbled on down the deck confused and embarrassed.”
The others in the group laughed at the image of me tormenting the tourists, but the man from whom I had wrested conversational control said, “That’s my story! That happened to a friend of mine. I told you that story four years ago at this party.”
I realized at once that he was right. I had been caught out. I considered telling him that I had not stolen it at all, but rather, it had trickled down to me. I did not tell him that. I said, “Exactly. And when you told it nobody laughed, and I thought, ‘That would work better in the first person and with less anger and more delight.’”
He said, “So you’re saying it’s OK to steal someone else’s story?”
My wife said, “I think he’s saying it’s not what you say, but how you say it.”